is obvious.  It contains no trace of the nervous vigour of his later style; the verse is weak, and the sentiment, to use his own expression, ‘Moorish.’  Indeed, the only interest of the little work lies in the evidence which it affords that the singular pre-occupation which eventually dominated Beddoes’ mind had, even in these early days, made its appearance.  The book is full of death.  The poems begin on battle-fields and end in charnel-houses; old men are slaughtered in cold blood, and lovers are struck by lightning into mouldering heaps of corruption.  The boy, with his elaborate exhibitions of physical horror, was doing his best to make his readers’ flesh creep.  But the attempt was far too crude; and in after years, when Beddoes had become a past-master of that difficult art, he was very much ashamed of his first publication.  So eager was he to destroy every trace of its existence, that he did not spare even the finely bound copies of his friends.  The story goes that he amused himself by visiting their libraries with a penknife, so that, when next they took out the precious volume, they found the pages gone.

Beddoes, however, had no reason to be ashamed of his next publication, The Brides’ Tragedy, which appeared in 1822.  In a single bound, he had reached the threshold of poetry, and was knocking at the door.  The line which divides the best and most accomplished verse from poetry itself—­that subtle and momentous line which every one can draw, and no one can explain—­Beddoes had not yet crossed.  But he had gone as far as it was possible to go by the aid of mere skill in the art of writing, and he was still in his twentieth year.  Many passages in The Brides’ Tragedy seem only to be waiting for the breath of inspiration which will bring them into life; and indeed, here and there, the breath has come, the warm, the true, the vital breath of Apollo.  No one, surely, whose lips had not tasted of the waters of Helicon, could have uttered such words as these: 

    Here’s the blue violet, like Pandora’s eye,
    When first it darkened with immortal life

or a line of such intense imaginative force as this: 

    I’ve huddled her into the wormy earth;

or this splendid description of a stormy sunrise: 

    The day is in its shroud while yet an infant;
    And Night with giant strides stalks o’er the world,
    Like a swart Cyclops, on its hideous front
    One round, red, thunder-swollen eye ablaze.

The play was written on the Elizabethan model, and, as a play, it is disfigured by Beddoes’ most characteristic faults:  the construction is weak, the interest fluctuates from character to character, and the motives and actions of the characters themselves are for the most part curiously remote from the realities of life.  Yet, though the merit of the tragedy depends almost entirely upon the verse, there are signs in it that, while Beddoes lacked the gift of construction,