These are wonderful verses for a lad of twenty-one, living among
anglers, undergraduates, and, if with some society of the lettered,
apparently with none which could appreciate or applaud him.

For the matter of the poem, the wild voyage of the mad monkish lover
with the dead Bride of Heaven, it strikes, of course, on the common
reef of the Romantic--the ridiculous. But the recurring contrasts of a
pure, clear peace in sea and sky, are of rare and atoning beauty. Such
a passage is--

"And the great ocean, like a holy hall,
Where slept a seraph host maritimal,
Was gorgeous with wings of diamond."

Once more, when the mad monk tells the sea-waves

"That ye have power and passion, and a sound
As of the flying of an angel round,
The mighty world, that ye are one with Time,"

we recognise genuine imagination.

A sympathetic reader of _The Death-Wake_ would perhaps have expected
the leprosies and lunacies to drop off, and the genius, purged of its
accidents, to move into a pure transparency. The abnormal, the
monstrous, the boyish elements should have been burned away in the
fire of the genius of poetry. But the Muses did not so will it, and
the mystic wind of the spirit of song became of less moment to Mr.
Stoddart than the breeze on the loch that stirs the trout to feed.
Perhaps his life was none the less happy and fortunate. Of the many