It is hard to speak of Mr. Gosse only as a poet without reference to his prose writings, where, indeed, he displays even a more subtle mastery of his art. But we should characterise him as a delicate, impassioned singer of some of the sweetest moods of life. In the fiercer and darker regions of the soul he does not love to linger; in his passion he is, so to speak, anchored safely to life--he is not whirled away in the eddies of elemental seas, with the wild energy that we see, for instance, in Charlotte Brontë's work. In the utmost abandonment of love or sorrow he is conscious of the red moon in the poplar, and the subtle scent of briar and honeysuckle; his feet are on the earth, and almost the deepest pang that he feels is when his jaded senses refuse to respond to the thrill that earth and sky are wont to awaken in him. With man in the abstract he has little sympathy; in the individual the keenest and most intimate delight. He is not the poet of movements; he has no wish to transcribe in verse the economical solutions of poverty. And, lastly, he resolutely lives in a region of sensuous, though pure, delight; he turns aside into the glade when the tainted air warns him that he is near some difficult horror on which he would not gaze. He has none of the impulse of the philosophers to see life steadily and see it whole, and if there is any note of timidity in the poems, we should ascribe it to the author having shunned, or rather missed, _the descent into hell_ which we are inclined to believe necessary for the highest artistic development. Each poet, each man, has his own hell, in which some brief sojourn is necessary if he is to test the seriousness of life and art. Mr. Gosse gives us no hint that this article is included in his creed; we cannot wish that he should be forced to include it, but we say that it is the conscious lack of this experience alone which has kept him from laying claim to the highest glories of song. Delicacy rather than intensity, that is the keynote of his lyrics. In an exquisite epistle lately addressed by Mr. Austin Dobson to Mr. Gosse, he speaks of himself and his friend as moving in the procession of art "where is not first nor last." "At least," he claims, "we have handed on the fire." We dare not expect all things from each man; but to have made some exquisite mood your own, and to have presented it with passionate accuracy, is no light achievement. 1894. EPILOGUE