Page:Genius, and other essays.djvu/192

GENIUS AND OTHER ESSAYS come to life again as Mr. Dobson's "Gentleman" and "Gentlewoman," his "Dorothy," or even that knight of the road, whose untimely taking-off is rehearsed in "The Ballad of 'Beau Brocade.'"

Our debonair poet elevates taste and feeling to the pitch of imagination. He yields himself to the spell of brooding memories and associations:

His pathos and tenderness appear, too, in more serious pieces. There are kind touches in "The Child-Musician," "The Cradle," and "A Nightingale in Kensington Gardens." Mr. Brander Matthews, one of our own most agreeable writers, justly lays stress upon Dobson's perfect absorption in his immediate theme, his art of shutting out from a poem everything foreign to its needs. How purely Greek the image of Autonoë! How minute the picture of "An Old Fish-Pond," and what shrewd wisdom! What human nature in "A Dead Letter," one of my favorite pieces,—and how perfect its reproduction of the ancestral mode! With all his regard for "values," the poet never goes to the pseudo-æsthetic extreme; indeed, he is the first to poke fun at it, and seems quite free from certain affectations of modern verse. His English is [178]