Full of fine qualities as is his best poetry, full of intellectual subtlety, imagination, and a rare combination of subjective with objective power, there is apparently in it a certain _je ne sais quoi_ which has prevented him at present from winning his true meed of fame. His hand, no doubt, is uncertain; but so is the hand of many a successful poet—that of Christina Rossetti, for instance. For sheer originality of conception and of treatment what recent poems surpass or even equal ‘Old Souls’ and the ‘Serpent Charmer’? Then take the remarkable mastery over colour exhibited by ‘Ortrud’s Vision.’ His volume of pantheistic sonnets in the Shakespearean form, ‘The New Day,’ written in his eighty-first year, is on the whole, however, his most remarkable work. The kind of Sufeyistic nature ecstasy displayed therein by a man of so advanced an age is nothing less than wonderful. And as to knowledge of nature, not even Wordsworth or Tennyson knew nature so completely as did Hake, for he had a thorough training as a naturalist. In looking at a flower he could enjoy not only its beauty, but also the delight of picturing to himself the flower’s inherited beauty and the ancestors from which the flower got its inheritance. And as regards the lyrical flow imported into so monumental a form as the sonnet, every student of this form must needs study the book with the greatest interest. His very latest work, however, is in prose. I find it extremely difficult to write about ‘Memoirs of Eighty Years.’ It is full of remarkable qualities: wit, humour, an ebullience of animal spirits that is Rabelaisian. What it lacks (and in some portions of it greatly lacks) is delicacy, refinement of tone. And surely this is remarkable when we realize the kind of man he was who wrote it.