I value "Nosce Teipsum" as a first thing for its _deep and original thinking_, i.e. for its _intellectual strength_--all the more remarkable that as the former part of the Memorial-Introduction shows, he was only in his 28th-29th year when he composed it. Of its art I shall have somewhat to say anon: but regarding it as a "_philosophical_ poem" and as a contribution to metaphysic, I place foremost the THOUGHT in it, as at once a characteristic and a merit (if merit be not too poor a word). DAVIES (along with FULKE GREVILLE, LORD BROOKE and DONNE) simply as Thinker on the profoundest problems of nature and human nature, seems to me to stand out pre-eminently, and in saying this, I regard it as sheer nonsense to exalt the workmanship at the expense of the material--to ask me to recognize in a bit of tin ingeniously and painstakingly etched into a kind of miracle of execution something co-equal with a solid bar of gold as it gleams i' the face of the sun in its purged and massive simpleness; or to put it unmetaphorically, I must pronounce judgment on the rank of a Poet _qua_ a Poet fundamentally on the kind and quality of the thought on higher and deeper things that he puts into his verse and that he strikes out in others. Your mere artist-Poet is surely third-rate and must even go beneath the music-composer of to-day. "Nosce Teipsum" as it was practically the earliest so it remains the most remarkable example of deep reflective-meditative thinking in verse in our language or in any language. The student of this great poem will very soon discover that within sometimes homeliest metaphors there is folded a long process of uncommon thought on the every-day facts of our mysterious existence. I call the thinking deep, because "Nosce Teipsum" reveals more than eyes that looked on the surface--reveals penetrative and bold descent to the roots of our being and reachings upward to the Highest. Your mere realistic word-painter of what he sees, is shallow beside a Poet who passes beneath the surface and circumstance and fetches up from sunless depths or down from radiant altitudes fact and facts--each contributory to that ultimate philosophy which while it shall accept every proved fact, will not rush off hysterically shouting "eureka," with ribald accusations of all that generations have held to be venerable and sustaining. I call the thinking original, for there is evidence everywhere in "Nosce Teipsum" that the penitent recluse of Oxford made his own self his study--as really if not as avowedly as Wordsworth.