On reading Mr. Flint one obtains a very distinct impression of Mr. Flint’s personality. One pictures him as a shy, sensitive, lonely dreamer filled with a desire to attain to the noblest and finest life, but somehow kept back from it. Mr. Flint is one of the few poets I know who have preserved intact today a spark of the old lyrical idealism. He is, perhaps, though he may not realize it, even closer to Keats and Shelley than to Verlaine—he might almost be called a modern Shelley. His affiliation with these earlier and greater romantics is more marked because it is an affiliation of spirit, not of form. Mr. Flint’s form has always been his own, and by holding conscientiously to his own form, he has come closer, to my way of thinking, to poets like Keats and Shelley than the innumerable tribe of imitators who have rashly taken the form for the substance. Here is an early example of Mr. Flint’s work: London, my beautiful, it is not the sunset, nor the pale green sky shimmering through the curtain of the silver birch, nor the quietness; it is not the hopping of the little birds upon the lawn, nor the darkness stealing over all things that moves me. But as the moon creeps slowly over the treetops among the stars; I think of her, and the glow her passing sheds on men. London, my beautiful, I will climb into the branches to the moonlit treetops that my blood may be cooled by the wind. And here is another, equally beautiful: Under the lily shadow, and the gold, and the blue, and the mauve, that the whin and the lilac pour down upon the water, the fishes quiver. Over the green cold leaves, and the rippled silver, and the tarnished copper of its neck and beak, toward the deep black water, beneath the arches, the swan floats slowly. Into the dark of the arch the swan floats, and the black depths of my sorrow bears a white rose of flame. If Mr. Flint had written nothing else but these two poems he would be immortal for their sake, in spite of his disregard—shared by H. D.—of the convenient device which begins each line of a poem with a capital letter, and of the laws of punctuation. They weave a perfect hypnotic spell in my mind, and they fulfill completely a recent definition of Mr. E. A. Robinson, that poetry is a language which expresses through an emotional reaction something which cannot be said in ordinary speech. Mr. Flint has given us other poems not less beautiful, but with a strain of greater pathos: