"For two years you went
Through all the worst of it."
"Knowing my last would be surely my bravest breath,
I am happy to-night; I have laughed to-night at death."
"Exposed to shame and mockery when the dawn
Unshutters the amused world."
In some it is the metre which halts, in some it is the prose style. I cannot quote the worst lines (they are bad only in their context) but even at that infelicities are easy to find. "Not aught." "Went through all the worst of it." "Wick's lambent dew." "Shame and mockery." "Laughed at death." It is a terrifying mixture of Keats and Hearst; hardly is it the work of poets who respect their vocation.
The poet who respects his vocation . . . his lot is harder than theirs. He approaches his verse with the seriousness which Squire devotes to his excellent editorial work. He spends five or ten years perfecting a single brief volume, till the lines and stanzas give the effect of inevitable rightness, till no word could be omitted or even a comma without destroying something. And still he remains vulnerable. Some capable critic arrives, fatally right and fatally from Oxford, to tell that his figures are strained; that he is neither Rabelais nor Ronsard. . . . A fate which Squire and Freeman need not fear; they have at least the shortcomings of Ronsard.
