Here is poetry of struggle, poetry not of the spirit of an epoch but of the life of an individual at odds with the epoch, introspective, personal. One thinks of Clough, who also was a teacher, a gentle soul oppressed with doubts and fears, a struggler in the darkness of the late nineteenth century. But Sill was less masculine than Clough. His doubtings are gentle and half apologetic. Never is he bitter or excited or impetuous. To such robust climaxes as "Say not the Struggle Naught Availeth" he is incapable of rising: he broods, but he is resigned. He exhorts himself deliberately to cheerfulness and faith and to heights of manhood where all that is low may fall away. Erotic passion has no part in his work. He has deliberately conquered it: Is my life but Marguerite's ox-eyed flower, That I should stand and pluck and fling away, One after one, the petal of each hour, Like a love-dreamy girl, and only say, "Loves me," and "loves me not," and "loves me"? Nay! Let the man's mind awake to manhood's power. No poet has shrunk more sensitively from the realistic, material age of which he was a part than Sill. His poems deal with the realm of the spirit rather than with the tangible. They are without time and place and material basis. One may illustrate with the poems he wrote for Yale gatherings. They are colorless: change but the name and they would apply as well to Harvard or Princeton. Read in connection with Hovey's dramatic, intensely individual Dartmouth poems and they seem like beautiful clouds. They are serious, often over-serious, they have no trace of humor, they deal with the soul life of one upon whom the darkness threatens constantly to fall. His claim to remembrance comes not from lyrical inspiration, for he was not lyrically gifted. He lacked what Gilder and Woodberry lacked. Once in a while he made a stanza that approaches lyric distinction, as, perhaps, in this final one of "A Foolish Wish": 'Tis a child's longing, on the beach at play: "Before I go," He begs the beckoning mother, "Let me stay One shell to throw!" 'Tis coming night; the great sea climbs the shore-- Ah, let me toss one little pebble more, Before I go! But not often lines so inevitable. His power came largely from the beauty and purity of his own personality. His own conception of a poem was, that "coming from a pure and rich nature, it shall leave us purer and richer than it found us." Judged by such a standard, Sill holds a high place among the poets. Nothing that he has written but leaves us purer and richer of soul and more serious before the problems of life. Eight or ten of his lyrics for a long time undoubtedly will hold their place among the very highest pieces of American reflective poetry.