Remiss the ministry they bear Who serve her with divided heart; She stands reluctant to impart Her strength to purpose, end, or care. Here, as in all his work, we shall look in vain for the “practical,” the “helpful.” The verses serve no cause, tell no story, point no moral. Their author has no “purpose, end, or care” other than the writing of poetry. His work is as devoid of motive as is the song of a skylark—it is merely poetry. No one knows what poetry is, but to the enlightened few who know what is poetry it is a rare and deep delight to find it in the form of virgin gold. “Gold,” says the miner “vext with odious subtlety” of the mineralogist with his theories of deposit—“gold is where you find it.” It is no less precious whether you have crushed it from the rock, or washed it from the gravel, but some of us care to be spared the labor of reduction, or sluicing. Mr. Sterling’s reader needs no outfit of mill and pan. I am not of those who deem it a service to letters to “encourage” mediocrity—that is one of the many ways to starve genius. From the amiable judgment of the “friendly critic” with his heart in his head, otherwise unoccupied, and the _laudator literarum_ who finds every month, or every week—according to his employment by magazine or newspaper—more great books than I have had the luck to find in a half-century, I dissent. My notion is that an age which produces a half-dozen good writers and twenty books worth reading is a memorable age. I think, too, that contemporary criticism is of small service, and popular acclaim of none at all, in enabling us to know who are the good authors and which the good books. Naturally, then, I am not overtrustful of my own judgment, nor hot in hope of its acceptance. Yet I steadfastly believe and hardily affirm that George Sterling is a very great poet—incomparably the greatest that we have on this side of the Atlantic. And of this particular poem I hold that not in a lifetime has our literature had any new thing of equal length containing so much poetry and so little else. It is as full of light and color and fire as any of the “ardent gems” that burn and sparkle in its lines. It has all the imagination of “Comus” and all the fancy of “The Faerie Queene.” If Leigh Hunt should return to earth to part and catalogue these two precious qualities he would find them in so confusing abundance and so inextricably interlaced that he would fly in despair from the impossible task. Great lines are not all that go to the making of great poetry, but a poem with many great lines is a great poem, even if it have—as usually it has, and as “A Wine of Wizardry” has not—prosaic lines as well. To quote all the striking passages in Mr. Sterling’s poem would be to quote most of the poem, but I will ask the reader’s attention to some of the most graphic and memorable. A cowled magician peering on the damned Thro’ vials wherein a splendid poison burns.