The shame I win for singing is all mine, The gold I miss for dreaming is all yours; that he from the first deliberately chose the path of stubborn thought rather than of genial emotion appears from his unforgettable _George Crabbe_: Whether or not we read him, we can feel From time to time the vigour of his name Against us like a finger for the shame And emptiness of what our souls reveal In books that are as altars where we kneel To consecrate the flicker, not the flame. In the nineties, when England was yellow with its Oscar Wildes and Aubrey Beardsleys and America was pink-and-white with its Henry van Dykes and Hamilton Wright Mabies, Mr. Robinson was finding himself in the novels of Thomas Hardy—the sonnet on whom has been omitted from this collection—and fortifying himself in the study of Crabbe’s “hard, human pulse.” His absolute loyalty to the ideals of art and wisdom thus achieved is a thrilling thing. The long delay of the fame to which he had every right may possibly be held in part to account for his countless variations upon the theme of vanity—even of futility, of which he is the laureate unsurpassed. Leaving to blither poets the pleasure of singing the achievements of the successful at the top of the wave, Mr. Robinson took for himself the task of studying the unarrived or the _passé_ or the merely mediocre. Consider Bewick Finzer, Familiar as an old mistake, And futile as regret; consider Miniver Cheevy, who wept that he was ever born because he could not stand the present and longed for the colours of romance— Miniver Cheevy, born too late, Scratched his head and kept on thinking; Miniver coughed, and called it fate, And kept on drinking; consider the Poor Relation, who has perforce outstayed her welcome and on whom The small intolerable drums Of Time are like slow drops descending; consider the women-maddened John Everldown, and Richard Cory committing suicide in the midst of what the world had thought triumphant prosperity, and Amaryllis shrunk and dead, and Aaron Stark so hard that pity makes him snicker, and Isaac and Archibald each telling their little friend that the other has grown senile, and the graceless, ancient vagabond Captain Craig discoursing gracefully from his death-bed like some trivial Socrates, and Leffingwell and Lingard and Clavering— Who died because he couldn’t laugh— and Calverly and that incomparably futile Tasker Norcross whose tethered range Was only a small desert, and yet who knew that there was a whole world of beauty and meaning somewhere if he could only reach it—all these are the brothers and the victims of futility. Even when Mr. Robinson ascends to examine the successful he bears with him the sense of the vanity of human life. The peak of his poetry is that speech in which Shakespeare, in _Ben Jonson Entertains a Man from Stratford_, likens men to flies for brevity and unimportance: