retract his superlative claims for his protege's promise.

More significant is a different note which is sometimes heard. In
Alexander Smith's _Life Drama_, it is ostensibly ironic. The critic
muses,

He died--'twas shrewd:
And came with all his youth and unblown hopes
On the world's heart, and touched it into tears.

In _Sordello_, likewise, it is the unappreciative critic who expresses
this sort of pleasure in Eglamor's death. But this feeling has also been
expressed with all seriousness, as in Stephen Phillip's _Keats_:

I have seen more glory in sunrise
Than in the deepening of azure noon,

or in Francis Thompson's _The Cloud's Swan Song_:

I thought of Keats, that died in perfect time,
In predecease of his just-sickening song,
Of him that set, wrapped in his radiant rhyme,
Sunlike in sea. Life longer had been life too long.

Obviously we are in the wake of the Rousseau theory, acclimatized in
English poetry by Wordsworth's youth "who daily farther from the east
must travel." A long array of poets testifies to the doctrine that a
poet's first days are his best. [Footnote: See S. T. Coleridge, _Youth
and Age_; J. G. Percival, _Poetry_; William Cullen Bryant, _I Cannot
Forget with What Fervid Devotion_; Bayard Taylor, _The Return of the