When he touches upon nature, we feel again that Watson is not "letting himself go." When he escapes from town it is not to revel and to make us revel in the sheer delight of rural sights and sounds. He feels as before, with the eye and the understanding, not with the buoyant blood of the full heart. No matter, he feels enough to give us this quatrain-- In stainless daylight saw the pure seas roll; Saw mountains pillaring the perfect sky: Then journeyed home to carry in his soul The torment of the difference till he die. Why should I go on to quote such lines as-- That thousand-memoried unimpulsive sea, or, Curls the labyrinthine sea Duteous to the lunar will. Enough that, thanks to a study of Spenser, Milton, Shelley, Keats, Wordsworth, Tennyson, and therefore a delicate taste in word and phrase, and thanks also to an innate genius for verbal music, restrained from Swinburnian riot by a true artistic instinct, Mr. Watson is a poet most delightful to the physical and the mental ear. That he has taken pains with his study is avowed by himself. Beginning with Shelley and passing through Keats to Wordsworth, he says-- In my young days of fervid poesy He drew me to him with his strange far light,-- He held me in a world all clouds and gleams, And vasty phantoms, where ev'n Man himself Moved like a phantom 'mid the clouds and gleams. Anon the Earth recalled me; and a voice Murmuring of dethroned divinities And dead times, deathless upon sculptured urn-- And Philomela's long-descended pain Flooding the night--and maidens of romance To whom asleep St. Agnes' love-dreams come-- Awhile constrained me to a sweet duresse And thraldom, lapping me in high content, Soft as the bondage of white amorous arms. And then a third voice, long unheeded--held Claustral and cold, and dissonant and tame--Found me at last with ears to hear. It sang Of lowly sorrows and familiar joys, Of simple manhood, artless womanhood, And childhood fragrant as the limpid morn; And from the homely matter nigh at hand, Ascending and dilating, it disclosed Spaces and avenues, calm heights and breadths Of vision, whence I saw each blade of grass With roots that groped about eternity, And in each drop of dew upon each blade The mirror of the inseparable All. It is also clear from such reminiscences as-- The laurel glorious from that wintry hair, which is practically Tennyson, or The maker of this verse, which shall endure By splendour of its theme, that cannot die, which, if I mistake not, is echoed Spenser, or-- And ghostly as remembered mirth, which is largely Tennyson again. I do not call these plagiarisms, I call them reflections of wide and retentive reading.