_What power is this_? _what witchery wins my feet_ _To peaks so sheer they scorn the cloaking snow_, _All silent as the emerald gulfs below_, _Down whose ice-walls the wings of twilight beat_? _What thrill of earth and heaven_—_most wild_, _most sweet_— _What answering pulse that all the senses know_, _Comes leaping from the ruddy eastern glow_ _Where_, _far away_, _the skies and mountains meet_? _Mother_, ’_tis I reborn_: _I know thee well_: _That throb I know and all it prophesies_, _O Mother and Queen_, _beneath the olden spell_ _Of silence_, _gazing from thy hills and skies_! _Dumb Mother_, _struggling with the years to tell_ _The secret at thy heart through helpless eyes_. [Picture: Reverie. Crayon by D. G. Rossetti at The Pines] Introduction ‘It was necessary for Thomas Hood still to do one thing ere the wide circle and profound depth of his genius were to the full acknowledged: that one thing was—to die.’—DOUGLAS JERROLD. ALTHOUGH in the inner circle of English letters this study of a living writer will need no apology, it may be well to explain for the general reader the reasons which moved me to undertake it. Some time ago a distinguished scholar, the late S. Arthur Strong, Librarian of the House of Lords, was asked what had been the chief source of his education. He replied: “Cambridge, scholastically, and Watts-Dunton’s articles in the ‘Encyclopædia Britannica’ and the ‘Athenæum’ from the purely literary point of view. I have been a reader of them for many years, and it would be difficult for me to say what I should have been without them.” Mr. Richard Le Gallienne has said that he bought the ‘Encyclopædia Britannica’ simply to possess one article—Mr. Watts-Dunton’s article on Poetry. There are many other men of letters who would give similar testimony. With regard to his critical work, Mr. Swinburne in one of his essays, speaking of the treatise on Poetry, describes Mr. Watts-Dunton as ‘the first critic of our time, perhaps the largest-minded and surest-sighted of any age,’ {1} a judgment which, according to the article on Mr. Watts-Dunton in Chambers’s ‘Encyclopædia,’ Rossetti endorsed. In this same article it is further said:—