possession of one or two signal gifts to which attention must now be
paid. He cultivated the indefinite, but, happily for us, in language so
definite and pure that when he succeeds it is with a cool fulness, an
absence of all fretting and hissing sound, such as can rarely be
paralleled in English literature. The finest things in Milton's 1645
volume, Wordsworth at his very best, Tennyson occasionally, Collins in
some of his shorter odes, have reached that perfection of syllabic
sweetness, that clear sound of a wave breaking on the twilight sands,
which Poe contrives to render, without an effort, again and again:--

"By a route obscure and lonely,
Haunted by ill angels only,
Where an Eidolon,[6] nam'd Night,
On a black throne reigns upright,
I have reached these lands but newly
From an ultimate dim Thule,
From a wild weird clime, that lieth, sublime.
Out of space, out of time."

The present moment is one in which the reaction against plastic beauty
in poetry has reached such a height that it is almost vain to appeal
against it. There is scarcely a single English poet of consequence in
the younger school who does not treat the strings of his lyre as though
he were preluding with a slate-pencil upon a slate. That this is done
purposely, and in accordance with mysterious harmonic laws entirely
beyond the comprehension of ordinary ears, makes the matter worse. There
is no heresiarch so dangerous as the priest of holy and self-abnegating
life, and it is to a poet no less learned than Mr. Robert Bridges, that
the twentieth century seems to owe the existing rage for cacophony. He
holds something of the same place in relation to Swinburne and Poe, that