THE

WILLIAM WATSON.1

`HE appearance of an edition of the collected poems of Mr. William Watson, carefully revised, with important alterations and additions, and comprising many new pieces, will be hailed joyfully wherever poetry is appreciated. Mr. Watson's reluctance to sanction any complete edition of his works has long been regretted by his many admirers, who have hitherto had to content themselves partly with the numerous booklets, often most difficult to procure, in which the poems originally appeared, and partly with the very imperfect collection published in 1899. These are now superseded by the present two volumes, which are not only within the reach of everybody, but which contain all that a most discriminating editor thinks best representative in the former miscellanies of Mr. Watson's work, Mr. Watson himself assisting by a final revision of each poem selected.

It would not perhaps be too much to say that Mr. Watson's reputation has hitherto been, like that of Matthew Arnold in his earlier days, somewhat

The Poems of William Watson. In two volumes. (John Lane, The Bodley Head. London and New York.)

esoteric, and there can be little doubt that the reason for this has been his refusal to consent to what happily he has at last been induced to sanction. The publication of these volumes, by giving the general public easy access to writings which could only be known to them fragmentarily, and which they were not likely to go out of their way to seek, cannot fail to enlarge Mr. Watson's sphere of influence and fame; and I heartily trust-for no influence could be more salutary, no fame more worthy to be universal-that this will be the case. To many thousands of his contemporaries he is probably, at present, best known by poems most of which stand in the same relation to those on which his fame will rest as Mrs. Browning's Italian tirades stand to Aurora Leigh and the Portuguese sonnets. But it is time that, to some at least of these thousands, he should be known as these volumes reveal him. To Mr. Watson himself such considerations are probably a matter of profound indifference. Like Arbuscula in Horace, he can say satis est equitem mihi plaudere, and of the "equites " he will always be sure-as sure, I venture to think, in his grave a century hence as he is sure of them to-day.

No one could go through these two volumes without being struck with the amount of work of the permanence, of the classical quality of which there can be no question. To begin with, they are a very treasury of jewelled aphorisms as profound and subtle, often, in wisdom and truth as they are consummately felicitous in expression. Take for in

stance:

Song is not Truth, not Wisdom, but the rose
Upon Truth's lips, the light in Wisdom's eyes

-that is immortal. Or take again such an exquisite triplet as this:

The wonder of the sweetness of a rose,

The wonder of the wild heart of a song,

Shall shame man's foolish wisdom to the close.

And how unforgettable in their several ways are the following:

or

ог

And set his heart upon the goal,

Not on the prize;

And evermore the deepest words of God
Are yet the easiest to understand;

Not in vague dreams of man forgetting men,
Nor in vast morrows losing the to-day.

Nor can a sonnet so superb as the following perish except with the language in which it is written; it is a gem without a flaw:

MELANCHOLIA.

In the cold starlight, on the barren beach,
Where to the stones the rent sea-tresses clave,
I heard the long hiss of the backward wave
Down the steep shingle, and the hollow speech
Of murmurous cavern-lips, nor other breach
Of ancient silence. None was with me, save
Thoughts that were neither glad nor sweet nor brave,
But restless comrades, each the foe of each.
And I beheld the waters in their might
Writhe as a dragon by some great spell curbed
And foiled; and one lone sail; and over me
The everlasting taciturnity;

The august, inhospitable, inhuman night,
Glittering magnificently unperturbed.

Among the many memorable reflections with which