Page:Adams - Essays in Modernity.djvu/33

Rh the side on which our final judgment of him in this poem rests. It is the exactly opposite side—the emotional side. And here we now enter within the golden gates of pleasure and praise.

What charming pictures he gives us of the quiet, radiant purity of his love as it takes shape in his sorrow! A dozen of these are the property of all poetry lovers, and are not needed here as ocular proof 'Dark house whereby once more I stand' (No. .); 'Be near me when my light is low' (No. .); 'When on my bed the moonlight falls' (No. .); 'Ring out, wild bells' (No. ). Why should I string these pearls together out of those bushels of vacant intellectual 'chaff well meant for grain'? That will be some one else's task before thirty years are gone, or, perchance, twenty.

And this note of sincerity, the true note, the characteristic note, the vital note, he attains to now at last in another department of his work—in the department of the love-poem. Passion seizes on him. In the actual results, of course, all his faults and limitations still grievously afflict him, and the first poem of power which he wrote—'Locksley Hall'—is disfigured no less as a serious piece of social criticism by the crudest enthusiasms than morally and spiritually by the vindictive meanness of the lover gloating over his mistress as she tends her drunken master and 'perishes' in