If the pathos in these poems is almost “too deep for tears,” it is gentler in the second and third of the lyrics, which are as exquisite as they are affecting. The idea in the lines _To Milton Blind_, is worthy of Milton’s own sublime conceit, that the darkness which had fallen on his eyes was but the shadow of God’s protecting wings. The whole poem, indeed, is a beautiful paraphrase of the noble passage in the _Second Defence of the People of England_: “For the Divine law”--we give it in the English translation--“not only shields me from injury, but almost renders me too sacred to attack, not indeed so much from the privation of my sight as from the overshadowing of those heavenly wings which seem to have occasioned this obscurity; and which, when occasioned, he is wont to illuminate with an interior light more precious and more pure.” In _The Lily_, which is a little obscure--a fault against which Mr. Phillips would do well to guard, for he frequently offends in this respect--we have the note of Petrarch, but Petrarch would not have ended the poem so flatly. Tennyson is recalled, too nearly perhaps, in “By the Sea,” but it is a poem of great charm and beauty. _The New De Profundis_ is, unhappily, the key to Mr. Phillips’ characteristic mood; it reminds us of the curse imposed on the worldling in Browning’s _Easter Day_, before he has learned the use of life and doubt. Mr. Phillips’ two most ambitious poems are _Christ in Hades_ and _Marpessa_. In _Christ in Hades_ he fails, as Mrs. Browning failed in _The Drama of Exile_. He attempts a theme--a stupendous theme--to which his genius is not equal, and which could only have been adequately treated by such poets as Dante and Milton, in the maturity of their powers. It has neither basis nor superstructure. It is what the Greeks would call “meteoric” as distinguished from “sublime.” It is a weird, wild, and chaotic dream; and yet for all this its appeal to the heart and the imagination is piercing and direct. Like Tennyson, Mr. Phillips has the art of unfolding the full significance of a few suggestive words in a great classic; and nothing could be more effective than the use to which he has applied the famous lines which Homer places in the mouth of Achilles. Poetry has few things more pathetic than Homer’s picture of Hades and the dead, and that pathos Mr. Phillips has given us in quintessence, as few would question after reading the lines which describe Persephone yearning for her return to the spring-illumined world, the speech of the Athenian ghost, and the woman’s address to Christ. If the world depicted has something of Horace’s artistic monster, or, to change the image, something of the anarchy of dreams in its composition, the vividness and picturesqueness with which particular figures and scenes are flashed into light and definition is extraordinarily impressive. It is so with the central figure, Christ; it is so with Prometheus; and the contrast between these martyrs for man