She lifted her hull like a breasting gull Where the rolling valleys be, And dipped where the shining porpoises Put ploughshares through the sea. * * * * * They all may home on a sleepy tide To the sag of an idle sheet; But it’s never again the Nancy’s Pride That draws men down the street. But the fishermen on the Banks, in the eerie watches of the moon, behold this apparition: When the light wind veers, and the white fog clears, They see by the after rail An unknown schooner creeping up With mildewed spar and sail. Her crew lean forth by the rotting shrouds, With the Judgment in their face; And to their mates’ “God save you!” Have never a word of grace. Then into the gray they sheer away, On the awful polar tide; And the sailors know they have seen the wraith Of the missing Nancy’s Pride. There have been spectral ships since visions were, but few conjured so vividly that one may almost see the crew lean forth by the rotting shrouds With the Judgment in their face, and watch them as into the gray they sheer away On the awful polar tide. The poem illustrates Mr. Carman’s gift of putting atmosphere into his work. A line may give the color, the setting, for an entire poem,—a very simple line, as this, With her creaking boom a-swing, or, “To the sag of an idle sheet,” which fixes at once the impression of a sultry, languorous air, one of those, half-veiled, “weather-breeder” days one knows so well. From a narrative standpoint the ballads are spirited, there is always a story worth telling; but they are occasionally marred by Mr. Carman’s prolixity, the besetting sin of his art. He who can crowd so much into a line is often lacking in the faculty of its appraisal, and frequently a crisp, telling phrase or stanza is weakened by the accretion that gathers around it. Beauty is rarely wanting in this accretion, but beauty that is not organic, not structurally necessary to the theme, becomes verbiage. Walter Pater has said it all in his fine passage: “For in truth all art does but consist in the removal of surplusage, from the last finish of the gem-engraver blowing away the last particle of invisible dust, back to the earliest divination of the finished work to be, lying somewhere, according to Michael Angelo’s fancy, in the rough-hewn block of stone.” It is not Mr. Carman’s divination of the finished work to be that is at fault; one feels that the subject is clearly visioned in his mind at the outset, but that it proves in some cases too alluring to his fancy. His work is not artificial; he is not fashioning poetic bric-à-brac to adorn his verse; sincerity is writ large upon it; but his mood is so compelling that he is carried on by the force of momentum, and finding, when the impulse is spent, so much beauty left behind, he has not the heart to destroy it.