work of such original and accomplished versemen as Rossetti and Swinburne. It is no small achievement to have pursued one's ideal until one's dying day, conscious the while that, great as one's impediments have been from without, one's chief obstacle has been one's own self.
Yes, this man was a poet, and, whether great or not, a unique poet. We may not go to him for insight into the human heart such as Shakespeare gives us; we may not go to him for sublime inspiration such as Milton can give us; we may not go to him for the humanity we find in Burns, the power we find in Byron, the idealism we find in Shelley, or the sweet wholesomeness we find in Longfellow, but we who care for him do go to him for his own note of longing and despair, for his own note of indescribable poetic magic, which, so far as I know, is to be found in no other of our poets the note he strikes, for example, in the stanza:
And all my days are trances,
And all my nightly dreams
Are where thy dark eye glances,
And where thy footstep gleams,
In what ethereal dances,
By what eternal streams.
The man who wrote these lines is with his own Israfel. He is worthy of
that lyre
By which he sits and sings—
The trembling, living lyre
Of those unusual strings.
