rather let them spring from the very ripest, richest-natured class of men and women, not servile to custom, but having the breadth of vision, the poise, the fine and harmonious development that flowers from the highest cultivation, whether in the schools or in life. It did not emasculate the work of Browning or Milton or Goethe, nor of our own Lowell, or many another, that he had the most profound enrichment that education and traditional culture could give him. Originality is not crushed by cultivation, nor will native impulse go far without it. The need is of a poet who shall divine the underlying harmonies of life, who shall stimulate and develop the higher nature, and disclose the alchemizing truth that shall transmute the gross ore of experience into the fine metal of character and spiritual beauty,—such a poet as Mr. Knowles himself may become when his idealism shall have taken on that inner sight of the mystic which now he shows so definitely in certain phases of his work. He is readier in general to see life’s benign face than its malign one, even though shapen by pain and guilt; and this brings us to the group of poems from his new volume, _Love Triumphant_, turning upon Sin and Remorse, and presenting an element of human passion at once the most provocative of degradation and the most susceptible of spiritual elevation. Whitman approached this theme from the cosmic standpoint as he would approach any of the universalities of life, not specifically from the spiritual side, in its destiny-shaping effects. It is from this side that Mr. Knowles essays its consideration, presenting chiefly the reactive, retributive phase of guilt,—the sudden spiritual isolation of the soul that has sinned, as if the golden doors that opened on the world had transformed to iron bars imprisoning the soul within its cell of memory. This sense of detachment, of having unwittingly plucked oneself from the flowering beauty of life, of being irrevocably cut off from sap and stem, which is the first and most palpable phase of guilt, predominates in several of the poems. To consider it first, then, the stanzas called “Lost” may be cited as illustrative: Night scattered gold-dust in the eyes of Earth, My heart was blinded by the excess of stars As, filled with youth and joy, I kept the Way. The solitary and unweaponed Sun Slew all the hosts of darkness with a smile, And it was Dawn. And still I kept the Way. The winds, those hounds that only God can leash, Bayed on my track, and made the morning wild With loud confusion, but I kept the Way. The hours climbed high. Peace, where the zenith broods, Fell, a blue feather from the wings of Heav’n. Lo! it was Noon. And still I kept the Way. At length one met me as my footsteps flagged,— Within her eyes oblivion, on her lips Delirious dreams—and I forgot the Way.