The day was like a Sabbath in a swoon. Under late summer’s blue were fair cloud-things Poising aslant upon their charméd wings, Arrested by some backward thought of June. Softly I trod and with repentant shoon, Half fearfully in sweet imaginings, Where lay, as might some golden court of kings, The old Quadrangle paved with afternoon. What else than a touch of genius is in those three words, “paved with afternoon,” as fixing the tempered light, the drowsy calm, of the place? The Octaves are written in groups, the poems of each having a slight dependence upon one another, so that to be quoted they require the connecting thought. In many cases also the first or the second quatrain of the Octave is more artistic than its companion lines, as in the one which follows, where the first four lines hold the creative beauty: As here among the well-remembering boughs, Where every leaf is tongue to ancient breath, Speech of the yesteryears forgathereth, And all the winds are long-fulfilléd vows— So from of old those ringing names arouse A whispering in the foliate shades of death, Where History her golden rosary saith, Glowing, the light of Memory on her brows. This Octave illustrates also what may be made as a general statement regarding its companions in the volume, that while the glamour may not rest equally upon the poems, they do not lack charm and distinction even in their less creative touches; and there are few in which there does not lurk some surprise in the way of picturesque phrasing. In the ordering of his cadences Mr. Upson shows a musician’s sense of rhythm; note, for example, how the transposition in the following lines enhances their melody and conveys in the initial one the sense of a river flowing: It was the lip of murmuring Thames along When new lights sought the wood all strangely fair, Such quiet lights as saints transfigured wear In minster windows crept the glades among. And far as from some hazy hill, yet strong, Methought an upland shepherd piped it there, Waking a silvern echo from her lair: “Sweet Thames, run softly till I end my song!” Mr. Upson not only obeys by artist instinct the laws of counterpoint, but employs the word with the music in it, and his effects are achieved by the innate harmony of his diction and the poetry in the theme he is shaping. Take as an illustration of this his Octave upon the “Roman Glassware Preserved in the Ashmolean.” Doubtless those fragments of crystal, sheathed, by centuries in the earth, in a translucent film through which shine tints of mother-of-pearl, have met the eyes of many of us, but it needed a poet to deduce from them this illustration: