"The sweet lad RHYME" ---- "ARDOUR, the sunlight on his greying hair" ---- "BEAUTY . . . pale in her black; dry-eyed, she stood alone." How vivid! The lines owe something to his eye for costume, for staging; but, as mere picture writing, it is as firm as if carved on an obelisk. And as he reconciled concrete and abstract here, so he had left his short breath, in those earlier lines, behind, and had come into the long sweep and open water of great style: -- "And light on waving grass, he knows not when, And feet that ran, but where, he cannot tell." Or; -- "And feel, who have laid our groping hands away; And see, no longer blinded by our eyes," Or, more briefly, -- "In wise majestic melancholy train." And this, -- "And evening hush broken by homing wings," Such lines as these, apart from their beauty, are in the best manner of English poetic style. So, in many minor ways, he shuffled contrast and climax, and the like, adept in the handling of poetic rhetoric that he had come to be; but in three ways he was conspicuously successful in his art. The first of these -- they are all in the larger forms of art -- is the dramatic sonnet, by which I do not mean merely a sonnet in dialogue or advancing by simple contrast; but one in which there may be these things, but also there is a tragic reversal or its equivalent. Not to consider it too curiously, take "The Hill". This sonnet is beautiful in action and diction; its eloquence speeds it on with a lift; the situation is the very crest of life; then, -- "We shall go down with unreluctant tread, Rose-crowned into the darkness! . . . Proud we were, And laughed, that had such brave true things to say. -- And then you suddenly cried and turned away." The dramatic sonnet in English has not gone beyond that, for beauty, for brevity, for tragic effect, -- nor, I add, for unspoken loyalty to reality. Reality was, perhaps, what he most dearly wished for; here he achieved it. In many another sonnet he won the laurel; but if I were to venture to choose, it is in the dramatic handling of the sonnet that he is most individual and characteristic.