poet of to-day, linked like him also, for consecration of the final
romance, with the isles of Greece, took for _his_ own the whole of
the poetic consciousness he was born to, and moved about in it as a
stripped young swimmer might have kept splashing through blue water and
coming up at any point that friendliness and fancy, with every prejudice
shed, might determine. Rupert expressed us _all_, at the highest
tide of our actuality, and was the creature of a freedom restricted only
by that condition of his blinding youth, which we accept on the whole
with gratitude and relief--given that I qualify the condition as
dazzling even to himself. How can it therefore not be interesting to see
a little what the wondrous modern in him consisted of?




I


What it first and foremost really comes to, I think, is the fact that at
an hour when the civilised peoples are on exhibition, quite finally and
sharply on show, to each other and to the world, as they absolutely
never in all their long history have been before, the English tradition
(both of amenity and of energy, I naturally mean), should have flowered
at once into a specimen so beautifully producible. Thousands of other
sentiments are of course all the while, in different connections, at
hand for us; but it is of the exquisite civility, the social instincts
of the race, _poetically_ expressed, that I speak; and it would be
hard to overstate the felicity of his fellow-countrymen's being able
just now to say: "Yes, this, with the imperfection of so many of our
arrangements, with the persistence of so many of our mistakes, with the