Page:Genius, and other essays.djvu/283

KIPLING'S BALLADS OF "THE SEVEN SEAS" him from the over-refinement which glosses the exquisite measures in which England's home-keeping poets give us chiefly variations of thoughts and themes essentially the same. The faultless verse of the closing period surely needed a corrective. The breath of Kipling's fresh and virile song swept across it like a channel sea-wind driving the spindrift over hedge and garden-close. Both its spirit and its method have taken the English-reading world, and they maintain their hold in this new collection, entitled The Seven Seas.

Few authors comprehend so well their natural bent as Mr. Kipling, or have the sense to follow it so bravely. At this stage, and as a poet, he is a balladist through and through, though one likely enough to be eminent in any effort which he may seriously undertake. The balladist's gift is distinctive. A single lyric of Drayton's, the thousandth part of his work, has made his name heroic. Browning's "Hervé Riel" and Tennyson's "The Revenge" and "Lucknow" show that their authors returned to the ballad, and not to something less, at the very height of their fame. We feel that, as a balladist alone, the preacher-poet of the "Last Buccaneer" and "Lorraine" was near of kin to his greater compeers, and if Thornbury's stars had not destined him to be a hack-writer, the Songs of the Cavaliers and Roundheads would not now be out of print through the obscurity of his name. But the splendor of "The English Flag" and "The Ballad of East and West," and the originality and weird power of "Danny Deever," find in the present [269]