Page:Adams - Essays in Modernity.djvu/227

Rh come to us as a sudden and sheer delight; and the reason is simple. For what in reality is rarer than freshness wedded to sincerity and strength at one with beauty? But few and far between as are such visitants from the mighty realm of the past, from the meagre realm of the present they come with an infrequency that is hateful, if indeed one might almost say they come at all. Let us not, therefore, be inveigled into forgetfulness of the fact of those first rapturous moments in any estimate we form of any writer who has been able to bestow them, seeing that, things being equal, this power has assuredly its justification for the critic's praise. And some such memento laudis is what I would fain affix here to my effort to speak, as adequately as I have been able, of Mr. Rudyard Kipling's verse, because the first perusal of the splendid score of his Barrack-Room Ballads gave me the keenest pleasure I have had in reading a book of poetry for several years. The second part of the volume, containing the 'Other Verses,' which, in his wisdom (or in the necessity of providing sufficient material for a seemly crown octavo at six shillings, or in the intention of a compromise between the two), he has seen fit to add, soon checked that pleasure, and presently chilled it to the bone. The rapturous moments of sheer and sudden delight, alas! were ended. A few days later