It would be very surprising if Mr Lawrence were not a poet in verse as well as in prose, if he did not sing when addressing his love:-- 'Coiffing up your auburn hair In a Puritan fillet, a chaste white snare To catch and keep me with you there So far away.' But a poet he is much more than a rebel, and that distinguishes him from the realists who have won fame by seeing the dunghill very well, and not at all the spreading chestnut-tree above. Though he select from the world, he is greedy for its beauty, so greedy that from all it has to give, flower, beast, woman, he begs more:-- 'You, Helen, who see the stars As mistletoe berries burning in a black tree, You surely, seeing I am a bowl of kisses, Should put your mouth to mine and drink of me,' 'Helen, you let my kisses steam Wasteful into the night's black nostrils; drink Me up, I pray; oh, you who are Night's Bacchante, How can you from my bowl of kisses shrink!' I cannot, having no faith in my power to judge poetry, proclaim Mr Lawrence to Parnassus, but I doubt whether such cries as these, where an urgent wistfulness mingles in tender neighbourhood with joy and pain together coupled, can remain unheard. And so it seems strange to find in Mr Lawrence activities alien a little to such verses as these, to have to say that he is also an authoritative critic of German literature, and the author of a prose drama of colliery life. More gladly would I think of him always as remote from the stirrings of common men, forging and nursing his dreams. For dreams they are, and they will menace the realities of his future if he cannot 'breathe upon his star and detach its wings.' It is not only the dragon of autobiography that threatens him. It is true that so far he has written mainly of himself, of the world in intimate relation with himself, for that every writer must do a little; but he has followed his life so very closely, so often photographed his own emotions, that unless life holds for him many more adventures, and unless he can retain the power to give minor incident individual quality, he may find himself written out. For Mr Lawrence has not what is called ideas. He is stimulated by the eternal rather than by the fugitive; the fact of the day has little significance for him; thus, if he does not renew himself he may become monotonous, or he may cede to his more dangerous tendency to emphasise overmuch. He may develop his illusion of culture among the vulgar until it is incredible; he may be seduced by the love he bears nature and its throbbings into allowing his art to dominate him. Already his form is often turgid, amenable to no discipline, tends to lead him astray. He sees too much, feels significances greater than the actual; with arms that are too short, because only human, he strives to embrace the soul of man. This is exemplified in his last novel, _The Rainbow_, of which little need be said, partly because it has been suppressed, and