Stephen Phillips's second volume of collected verse, _New Poems_ (1907), came ten years after the first, and was to me an agreeable surprise. His devotion to the drama made me fear that he had burned himself out in the _Poems_ of 1897; but the later book is as unmistakably the work of a poet as was the earlier. The mystical communion with nature is expressed with authority in such poems as _After Rain_, _Thoughts at Sunrise_, _Thoughts at Noon_. Indeed the first-named distinctly harks back to that transcendental mystic of the seventeenth century, Henry Vaughan. The greatest triumph in the whole volume comes where we should least expect it, in the eulogy on Gladstone. Even the most sure-footed bards often miss their path in the Dark Valley. Yet in these seven stanzas on the Old Parliamentary Hand there is not a single weak line, not a single false note; word placed on word grows steadily into a column of majestic beauty. This poem is all the more refreshing because admiration for Gladstone had become unfashionable; his work was belittled, his motives befouled, his clear mentality discounted by thousands of pygmy politicians and journalistic gnats. The poet, with a poet's love for mountains, turns the powerful light of his genius on the old giant; the mists disappear; and we see again a form venerable and august. The saint and poet dwell apart; but thou Wast holy in the furious press of men, And choral in the central rush of life. Yet didst thou love old branches and a book, And Roman verses on an English lawn.... Yet not for all thy breathing charm remote, Nor breach tremendous in the forts of Hell, Not for these things we praise thee, though these things Are much; but more, because thou didst discern In temporal policy the eternal will; Thou gav'st to party strife the epic note, And to debate the thunder of the Lord; To meanest issues fire of the Most High.