maimed and mauled by youth's ignorance of irreparable damage, he does not hesitate, on returning to the trenches, to offer his gallant comrades these ungenerous lines which were possibly not really aimed at the invalids he had met at Biarritz, but at those whom he could never forget, his equals in youth and strength, who then still lingered in the States.
"Apart sweet women (for whom heaven be blessed),
Comrades, you cannot think how thin and blue
Look the left-overs of mankind that rest,
Now that the cream has been skimmed off in you.
. . . we turn disdainful backs
On that poor world we scorn, yet die to shield,—
That world of cowards, hypocrites and fools."
He has given himself for the freedom of all future souls, what right have we to question whether he gave his own conscience due reverence? Could we have divined King Lear from reading Venus and Adonis? That ready aptness of phrase which in my citations has delighted the reader is constantly achieved in his later poems, if only by four or six lines at a time. And though the inspired peaks rise tier behind tier above this plateau, you find few flowers more brilliant without climbing higher. Yet that failure in delicate choicefulness insistently prophesies woe, and was not so striking in Swinburne or more so in Byron at his years. The Deserted Garden, his longest poem, yielded as abundant opportunities as Venus and Adonis could, but no line like
"A lily prisoned in a gale of snow"
takes the advantage. In spite of formlessness, how delightful the Keats of Endymion would have made this old Mexican garden, where the young Seeger dreams the meetings of bygone lovers. He, however, only maintains his obvious efficiency, and we are never "surprised with joy": in the end we are only surprised that he can keep
