In relation to diction, there are few American writers who use English of such purity and finish as does Mr. Santayana; but it is the scholar’s English, the English drawn from familiarity with the great masters and models, and hence lacks the creative flexibility, the quick, warm, ductile adaptability, that a much less accomplished poet may give to his words. It keeps to the accepted canons, the highest, the purest, and uses the consecrated words of literature with an artist’s touch; but the racy idiom, the word which some daring poet coined yesterday in an exigent moment—with these it has naught to do. Mr. Santayana has several dramatic poems, “The Hermit of Carmel,” “The Knight’s Return,” and a dialogue between Hermes and Lucifer, in which the latter relates the details of his banishment from heaven for his daring arraignment and interrogation of God. The dialogue has little dramatic coloring; one hearing it read aloud would have difficulty in determining from the outward change of expression and personality where Lucifer leaves off speaking and Hermes begins, but it puts into the mouth of Lucifer some words full of the challenge of thought, and speaks through both some beautiful fantasies, such as this reply of Lucifer to Hermes’ question as to the state of bliss in which the angels dwell: A doubtful thing Is blessedness like that…. Their raptured souls, like lilies in a stream That from their fluid pillow never rise, Float on the lazy current of a dream. Mr. Santayana has not written “The Hermit of Carmel” or “The Knight’s Return” with a theatrical manager in view. They are stories told in verse, tales of gentle melancholy, pleasant to the ear; but when all is said, one returns to his sonnets as the true expression of his nature and the consummation of his gifts. He is a sonneteer, by every phase of his temperament and every canon of his art. His work in all other forms is cultivated, philosophical, finely finished, but pervaded by an atmosphere of cultured conventionality; whereas in the sonnet he finds a medium whose classic distinction and subtlety are so harmonized to his nature and his characteristic mode of thought, that it becomes to him the predestined expression. A glance, then, in closing, at the flexile phrases, the psychological analyses of the later sonnet sequence, turning chiefly upon love. But, first, let me cite from one of the earlier sonnets, an image drawn from this theme, a jewel-like flash of beauty, not to be overlooked. The first line of the metaphor is commonplace; but note the succeeding ones: Love but the formless and eternal Whole From whose effulgence one unheeded ray Breaks on this prism of dissolving clay Into the flickering colors of thy soul. This is defining the individual spirit in exquisite terms. The second sequence teems with beautiful passages, now and again with a note of the _trovatore_, as in the sestett of this sonnet: