has both pathos and grandeur. There is more originality, more power in _Christ in Hades_ than in _Marpessa_, but _Marpessa_ has more balance, more sanity, more of the stuff out of which good and abiding poetry is made, than its predecessor. The one savours of the spasmodic school, the productions of which have rarely been found to have the principle of life, however rich they may have been in promise; the other is a return to a school in which most of those who have gained permanent fame have studied. And we are glad to find a young poet there. But it would be doing Mr. Phillips great injustice not to note that, though he has had many predecessors in the semi-classical, semi-romantic re-treatment of the Greek myths, notably Keats in _Hyperion_, Wordsworth in _Dion_ and _Laodamia_, Landor in his _Hellenics_, and Tennyson in _Ænone_ and _Tithonus_, he has treated his theme with a distinction which is all his own, and has impressed on it an intense individuality. In comparison with these masters he may be _pauper_, but he is _pauper in suo ære_. It would be easy to point to faults in Mr. Phillips’ work. His sense of rhythm, even allowing for what are plainly deliberate experiments in discord, seems often curiously defective. How stiff and limping, for example, is the following:-- “O pity us, For I would ask of thee only to look Upon the wonderful sunlight and to smell Earth in the rain. Is not the labourer Returning heavy through the August sheaves Against the setting sun, who gladly smells His supper from the opening door--is he Not happier than these melancholy kings? How good it is to live, even at the worst! God was so lavish to us once, but here He hath repented, jealous of His beams.” Lines, again, like “Pierced her, and odour full of arrows was,” “Realizes all the uncoloured dawn,” “Yet followed a riddled memorable flag,” are, no doubt, extreme instances, but they are typical of many bad lines. Occasionally he falls flat on some harsh prosaic phrase, like “beautiful indolence _was on our brains_.” Nor is he always happy in his attempts at novelty in phraseology, as in his employment of the words “liable,” “inaccurate,” “pungent”; and these faults in rhythm and diction are the more remarkable, as the really subtle mastery over rhythmic expression which he exhibits at times, and his singularly felicitous epithets, turns, and phrases are among his most striking gifts. Take a few out of very many: “A bleak magnificence of endless hope,” “That common trivial face, of endless needs,” “The mystic river, floating wan,” “And the moist evening fallow, richly dark,” “That palest rose sweet on the night of life.” How noble is the rhythm and imagery of the following:--