Page:The New Monthly Magazine - Volume 100.djvu/56

42 His "gold and crimson morning" has had its dawn—glowing with promise and performance: for the "soft blue day" we look with hope, but patience.

If the foregoing remarks on Mr. Smith's extraordinary gift for poetical imagery, appear too much taken up with his least successful ventures, we would qualify them by enforcing once again our sincere admiration of that gift in its higher developments. At almost every page we see, to use the language of Wordsworth,The poet's delight in the exercise of this his native wealth, is freely avowed by him in the record—for we may assume it to be his—Let us cull one or two from the jewelled confusion in which they "lie thick" together. A word to womankind:A vexed soul, tossed with tempests and not comforted, at last finds a lull of the tempest, and comfort in large measure, and so exclaims—Here is a Midsummer-day's picture—quite Turner-like in vivid colouring:With which Ovidian "theory of the tides" may be compared the following:

This is very striking, but too sensuous. The sensuous is not indeed a