Moody's Puritanism gives strength to many of his poems, but in others it produces strange inconsistencies and evasions. It helped him to write "The Brute"--a strong and sincere poem. But it caused him to fail ridiculously in "A Dialogue in Purgatory," in "Good-Friday Night," and in "Song Flower and Poppy." In the second half of the last-named poem we come upon the root of the matter--Moody's complete failure to understand any religious system, any philosophy of life, more warm and comprehensive than his own Puritanism. He rebelled against this Puritanism, yet he could not escape it. He sought vaguely after paganism, whereas he could no more have been a Bacchic reveller than he could have been a Druid. In spite of his reading of early French and Italian romances, he failed utterly to see the generous glories of the Middle Ages, when all that was noble and beautiful in paganism was made a part of the richest civilization the world has yet known. He thought of intellectual development and spiritual freedom as things beginning about 1517--and naturally this hampered him when he wrote about Michael, Raphael, Azaziel, Eve, Jubal, and Cain. A longer residence in Italy might have given him a more liberal culture and a spiritual philosophy generous without being pagan, pure without being Puritanical. And therefore the critics who said that a poet of promise died in 1910 may have told the truth. A broader culture and more extensive human sympathies would have enabled this deft artist in words to give to the world a message of the kind it always welcomes--to express beautifully the beauty that is truth. * * * * * TRANSCRIBER'S NOTES: Text in italics is surrounded with underscores: _italics_. Inconsistencies in spelling and hyphenation have been retained from the original. Obvious typographical and punctuation errors have been corrected without note.