greatly from each other"; and he goes on to quote from
an essay of Mr. Yeats in which that admirable poet and
critic distinguishes the "interests" or absorbing topics of
five of his greater contemporaries: "Contemporary Eng-
lish poets," writes Mr. Yeats, "are interested in the glory
of the world like Mr. Rudyard Kipling; or in the order of
the world like Mr. William Watson; or in the passion
of the world like Mr. John Davidson; or in the pleas-
ure of the world like Mr. Arthur Symons. Mr. Francis
Thompson . . . is alone preoccupied with a spiritual life."
With this for our rough chart let us embark on the per-
ilous sea of the present, mindful that in this, our work
with the lyric, we are neither judging any author in the
completeness of his contribution to literature nor (when
he is still with us) even in the completeness of his lyrical
achievement. Moreover few judge well, deprived of the
atmosphere of distance and the perspective of time.

By "the Wordsworthians" among our contemporary
poets, Professor Weygandt, cited above, appears to mean
less those whose cult is nature and the Delphic interpret-
ation of her moods to the inner spirit of man, than the
poets of blended Hebraic order and Hellenistic beauty,
the spirit of which has inspired the august succession
from Spenser and Milton, to Gray, Wordsworth, Tenny-
son, and Matthew Arnold, the spirit which, in a word, is
most justly designated, as the critic has designated it,
"fidelity to the Puritan point of view." ¹ It cannot be

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