136 The Future Poetry
in poetry and this number is not inconsiderable. But elsewhere
he rises high, sometimes astonishingly high, for a few lines but
cannot keep long to the high poetic expression and sometimes
can sink low and sometimes astonishingly low, even to bathos
and triviality, especially when he strains towards an excessive
simplicity which can become puerile or worse. He intellectualises
his poetic statement overmuch and in fact states too much and
sings too little, has a dangerous turn for a too obvious sermon-
ising, pushes too far his reliance on the worth of his substance
and is not jealously careful to give it a form of beauty. In his
works of long breath there are terrible stretches of flattest prose
in verse with lines of power, sometimes of fathomless depth like
that wonderful
Voyaging through strange seas of Thought, alone,interspersed or occurring like a lonely and splendid accident,
rari nantes in gurgite vasto.^1 It has been said with justice that he
talks too much in verse and sings too little; there is a deficient
sense of the more subtle spirit of rhythm, a deficiency which
he overcomes when moved or lifted up, but which at other
times, hampers greatly his effectiveness. His theory of poetic
diction, though it has a certain truth in it, was, as he practised
it, narrow and turned to unsoundness; it betrayed him into the
power of the prosaic and intellectual element in his mind. These
defects grew on him as the reflective moralist and monk and
the conventional citizen, — there was always in him this curious
amalgam, — prevailed over the seer and poet.
But still one of the seer-poets he is, a seer of the calm spirit
in Nature, the poet of man’s large identity with her and serene
liberating communion: it is on this side that he is admirable
and unique. He has other strains too of great power. His chosen
form of diction, often too bare and trivial in the beginning,
too heavy afterwards, helps him at his best to a language and
movement of unsurpassed poetic weight and gravity charged
with imaginative insight, in which his thought and his ethical
(^1) “Rare swimming in the vast gurge.”