right thing at the right moment, although his death had doubled their appeal.
Poems demand to be read aloud by someone who has instinctive sympathy for the pace, tone and address proper to each. For many the interest must at first, and perhaps long, lie in the mental attitude revealed. Nor is this attitude a small or insignificant part of the impression which ought to be made by poetry—the most perfect speech of man, as it has been called—that is, the utterance to which the greatest number of his faculties combined in harmonious balance contribute. The way the speaker has borne himself, and the way he now confronts the world, must influence this harmony profoundly. His words betray his past and present to those whose attention is sufficiently continuous and searching, by indices that lie around and beyond the mere meaning of the sentences used—indices gleaned from their interplay and the degree in which each alters and defines the whole sense, as much as from the melody of the words or the rhythm of their just enunciation. This aroma, which arises from the organism of the meaning, translators can often convey to other nations; for the beauties of diction and rhythm, many among those who speak the same tongue should accept the verdict of trained appreciators. Now melody and rhythm often engross trained apprehension, and the less learned may therefore be more ready to note the grave drift of wonder which flows beneath the playful, indulged and indulgent surface of Brooke's art, than were his æsthetic admirers. Those eyes which gaze out from behind his poems have been fascinated by the contrast between the momentousness of life to us, and our strangely casual relation to its vast movement, which is not at all suited to nourish our hopes of divining the whole truth. Those eyes seem to dance; for has not methodic inquiry begun to reconsider what it had denounced as entirely fabulous? Death's door, which Spencer, Renan and
