You are circled, as by magic, In a surf-built palmy bubble, Tusitala; Fate hath chosen, but the choice is Half delectable, half tragic, For we hear you speak, like Moses, And we greet you back enchanted, But reply's no sooner granted Then the rifted cloudland closes. But the poem must be read in its entirety to give an idea of the delicate melody, the haunting pathos of the strain. It is a poem above praise. Classification in poetry is a fruitless task, and it is impossible to do a poet a greater wrong than unnecessarily to seal him of a certain tribe; he must be _sui generis_; many writers can imitate with singular felicity; Owen Meredith wrote lines which, if they had been written by Tennyson, would have been reckoned among his sweetest, but they were Owen Meredith and not Tennyson. So Mr. Stevenson in prose is responsible for a knot of ventriloquists who seem to speak with the authentic voice; the hands are the hands of Esau and the utterance is only not Esau's too. Mr. Gosse is an obsequious follower of none. He has little in common with our pre-eminent lyric lord, Mr. Swinburne; Mr. Swinburne is a rhapsodist, who has made such stately and exhaustive use of the rare dactylic element in English that it is hard to see how any dactylic poetry should in future be cast in any different mould. Mr. Morris is _raconteur_ first; his ancient tales create their form, and ornament is accessory to narrative. These are the two great planets of our firmament, but there are other stars of brilliant and individual fire. Mr. Austin Dobson is the soul of exquisite _finesse_, but the fine, careless rapture he does not claim. Mr. Kipling comes like an explorer laden with strange spoils from an unvisited land, but whether any one may tread in his footsteps is uncertain; it is uncertain, too, whether he has triumphed over or through his environment, and Mr. Gosse has little in common, save his generous admiration, with a poet starred and crowned with gems that all the world before him had conspired to cheapen. Mr. Stevenson, in poetic quality among the greatest, is reticent and will not speak--poignant sincerity is perhaps his most moving characteristic; Mr. Patmore strikes an old, full-flavoured note, in the region of happy homely courtesies--though in the "Unknown Eros" he has once or twice fused the precision of George Herbert with the dignity of Gray. But Mr. Gosse, the Epicurean in the House, would haunt the library rather than the dining-room.