realism as honest and clear-sighted as that of Crabbe or Masefield. In
_The Woman with the Dead Soul_ and _The Wife_ we have
naturalism elevated into poetry. He could make a London night as
mystical as a moonlit meadow. And in a brief couplet he has given to
one of the most familiar of metropolitan spectacles a pretty touch of
imagination. The traffic policeman becomes a musician.

The constable with lifted hand
Conducting the orchestral Strand.

Stephen Phillips's second volume of collected verse, _New Poems_
(1907), came ten years after the first, and was to me an agreeable
surprise. His devotion to the drama made me fear that he had burned
himself out in the _Poems_ of 1897; but the later book is as
unmistakably the work of a poet as was the earlier. The mystical
communion with nature is expressed with authority in such poems as
_After Rain_, _Thoughts at Sunrise_, _Thoughts at
Noon_. Indeed the first-named distinctly harks back to that
transcendental mystic of the seventeenth century, Henry Vaughan. The
greatest triumph in the whole volume comes where we should least
expect it, in the eulogy on Gladstone. Even the most sure-footed bards
often miss their path in the Dark Valley. Yet in these seven stanzas
on the Old Parliamentary Hand there is not a single weak line, not a
single false note; word placed on word grows steadily into a column of
majestic beauty.

This poem is all the more refreshing because admiration for Gladstone
had become unfashionable; his work was belittled, his motives
befouled, his clear mentality discounted by thousands of pygmy
politicians and journalistic gnats. The poet, with a poet's love for