" The song,
"A spirit haunts the year's last hours,"
is not to be surpassed for its picture of the autumnal
garden.
The new poems, found in the present edition, show us our friend
of ten years since much altered, yet the same. The light he sheds on
the world is mellowed and tempered. If the charm he threw around us
before was somewhat too sensuous, it is not so now; he is deeply
thoughtful; the dignified and graceful man has displaced the Antinous
beauty of the youth. His melody is less rich, less intoxicating, but
deeper; a sweetness from the soul, sweetness as of the hived honey of
fine experiences, replaces the sweetness which captivated the ear
only, in many of his earlier verses. His range of subjects was great
before, and is now such that he would seem too merely the amateur,
but for the success in each, which says that the same fluent and
apprehensive nature, which threw itself with such ease into the forms
of outward beauty, has now been intent rather on the secrets of the
shaping spirit. In `Locksley Hall,' `St. Simeon Stylites,'
`Ulysses,' `Love and Duty,' `The Two Voices,' are deep tones, that
bespeak that acquaintance with realities, of which, in the `Palace of
Art,' he had expressed his need.
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