Water and sky were devils' brews which boiled, Boiled, shrieked, and glowered; but the ship was saved. Snugged safely down, though fourteen sails were split. Out of the dark a fiercer fury raved. The grey-backs died and mounted, each crest lit With a white toppling gleam that hissed from it And slid, or leaped, or ran with whirls of cloud, Mad with inhuman life that shrieked aloud. Mr. Masefield is a better poet than critic. In the New York _Tribune_ for 23 January 1916, he spoke with modesty and candour of his own work and his own aims, and no one can read what he said without an increased admiration for him. But it is difficult to forgive him for talking as he did about Wordsworth, who "wrote six poems and then fell asleep." And among the six are not _Tintern Abbey_ or the _Intimations of Immortality_. Meditative poetry is not Mr. Masefield's strongest claim to fame, and we do not go to poets for illuminating literary criticism. Swinburne was so violent in his "appreciations" that his essays in criticism are adjectival volcanoes. Every man with him was God or Devil. It is rare that a creative poet has the power of interpretation of literature possessed by William Watson. Mr. Masefield does not denounce Wordsworth, as Swinburne denounced Byron; he is simply blind to the finest qualities of the Lake poet. Yet, although he carries Wordsworth's famous theory of poetry to an extreme that would have shocked the author of it--if Mr. Masefield does not like _Tintern Abbey_, we can only imagine Wordsworth's horror at _The Everlasting Mercy_--the philosophy of poetry underlying both _The Everlasting Mercy_, _The Widow in the Bye Street_, and other works is essentially that of William Wordsworth. Keeping _The Everlasting Mercy_ steadily in mind, it is interesting, instructive, and even amusing to read an extract from Wordsworth's famous Preface of 1800. "The principal object, then, proposed in these poems was to choose incidents and situations from common life, and to relate or describe them, throughout, as far as was possible in a selection of language really used by men, and, at the same time, to throw over them a certain colouring of imagination, whereby ordinary things should be presented to the mind in an unusual aspect; and, further, and above all, to make these incidents and situations interesting by tracing in them, truly though not ostentatiously, the primary laws of our nature; chiefly, as far as regards the manner in which we associate ideas in a state of excitement. Humble and rustic life was generally chosen, because, in that condition, the essential passions of the heart find a better soil in which they can attain their maturity, are less under restraint, and speak a plainer and more emphatic language; because in that condition of life our elementary feelings coexist in a state of greater simplicity, and, consequently, may be more accurately contemplated, and more forcibly communicated; because the manners of rural life