And this, --

"And evening hush broken by homing wings,"

Such lines as these, apart from their beauty, are in the best manner
of English poetic style. So, in many minor ways, he shuffled
contrast and climax, and the like, adept in the handling
of poetic rhetoric that he had come to be; but in three ways
he was conspicuously successful in his art.

The first of these -- they are all in the larger forms of art --
is the dramatic sonnet, by which I do not mean merely
a sonnet in dialogue or advancing by simple contrast;
but one in which there may be these things, but also there is
a tragic reversal or its equivalent. Not to consider it too curiously,
take "The Hill". This sonnet is beautiful in action and diction;
its eloquence speeds it on with a lift; the situation is
the very crest of life; then, --

"We shall go down with unreluctant tread,
Rose-crowned into the darkness! . . . Proud we were,
And laughed, that had such brave true things to say.
-- And then you suddenly cried and turned away."

The dramatic sonnet in English has not gone beyond that, for beauty,
for brevity, for tragic effect, -- nor, I add, for unspoken loyalty
to reality. Reality was, perhaps, what he most dearly wished for;
here he achieved it. In many another sonnet he won the laurel;
but if I were to venture to choose, it is in the dramatic handling
of the sonnet that he is most individual and characteristic.