his glorious career; Shelley and Byron and Keats were dead, and the
_annus mirabilis_ of Coleridge was long gone by. Three young poets of
the English-speaking race were producing their volumes, destined at
first to temporary neglect. The year 1830 was the year of Mr.
Tennyson's _Poems, chiefly Lyrical_, his first book, not counting
_Poems by Two Brothers_. It was also the year of Mr. Browning's
_Pauline_ (rarer even than _The Death-Wake_); and it was the year
which followed the second, and perhaps the most characteristic,
poetical venture of Edgar Allan Poe. In Mr. Tennyson's early lyrics,
and in Mr. Poe's, any capable judge must have recognised new notes of
romance. Their accents are fresh and strange, their imaginations dwell
in untrodden regions. Untouched by the French romantic poets, they yet
unconsciously reply to their notes, as if some influence in the mental
air were at work on both sides of the Channel, on both sides of the
Atlantic. Now, in my opinion, this indefinite influence was also
making itself felt, faintly and dimly, in Scotland. _The Death-Wake_
is the work of a lad who certainly had read Keats, Coleridge and
Shelley, but who is no imitator of these great poets. He has, in a few
passages, and at his best, an accent original, distinct, strangely
musical, and really replete with promise. He has a fresh unborrowed
melody and mastery of words, the first indispensable sign of a true
poet. His rhymed heroic verse is no more the rhymed heroic verse of
_Endymion_, than it is that of Mr. Pope, or of Mr. William Morris. He
is a new master of the old instrument.

His mood is that of Scott when Scott was young, and was so anxious to
possess a death's head and cross-bones. The malady is "most incident"
to youth, but Mr. Stoddart wears his rue with a difference. The mad
monkish lover of the dead nun Agathé has hit on precisely the sort of
fantasy which was about to inspire Théophile Gautier's _Comédie de la