And are its plumes a burning bright array? They burn for an unincarnated eye. A bubble, charioteered by the inward breath Which, ardorous for its own invisible lure, Urges me glittering to aerial death, I am rapt towards that bodiless paramour; Blindly the uncomprehended tyranny Obeying of my heart's impetuous might. Scarcely could a single line express more concisely and more significantly the truth about Thompson than one of these lines. "Urges me glittering to aerial death:" how true that is in its confession of that fatal vagueness of aim, showiness of equipment and the toppling disaster of it all! Thompson has miscalculated his strength of flight. He is for ever straining after the heights, and there are moments when he seems to have reached them. But it is only that he has dazzled and confused our sight by the trick of some unfamiliar magic. And his magic, for the most part, is a magic of words. Those suggestions of a rare poetic vision, which, from the first, seemed nebulous rather than illuminated, have become little more than verbal sophistries. To have transposed a phrase until it becomes To Naiad it through the unfrothing air satisfies him as though it had been a vision or an invention. The frigid conceit of The blushes on existence's pale face satisfies him as though it were an imaginative conception. And such combinations of words as The very hues Which their conflagrant elements effuse satisfy him as being effects of appropriate poetic novelty. The _Poems_, with all their faults, had suggestions of finer possibilities. In _Sister-Songs_ none of these possibilities is realized. At the most it is a sort of fantastic world of waters (shall we say, at Thompson's suggestion?) where, ----like the phantasms of a poet pale, The exquisite marvels sail: Clarified silver; greens and azures frail As if the colours sighed themselves away, And blent in supersubtile interplay As if they swooned into each other's arms; Repured vermilion, Like ear-tips 'gainst the sun; And beings that, under night's swart pinion, Make every wave upon the harbour bars A beaten yolk of stars. But where day's glance turns baffled from the deeps, Die out those lovely swarms; And in the immense profound no creature glides or creeps.