one of the most singular examples of his vein of grotesque and ominous humour—­The Oviparous Tailor.  Yet it may be doubted whether even Mr. Gosse’s edition is the final one.  There are traces in Beddoes’ letters of unpublished compositions which may still come to light.  What has happened, one would like to know, to The Ivory Gate, that ‘volume of prosaic poetry and poetical prose,’ which Beddoes talked of publishing in 1837?  Only a few fine stanzas from it have ever appeared.  And, as Mr. Gosse himself tells us, the variations in Death’s Jest Book alone would warrant the publication of a variorum edition of that work—­’if,’ he wisely adds, for the proviso contains the gist of the matter—­’if the interest in Beddoes should continue to grow.’

’Say what you will, I am convinced the man who is to awaken the drama must be a bold, trampling fellow—­no creeper into worm-holes—­no reviver even—­however good.  These reanimations are vampire-cold.’  The words occur in one of Beddoes’ letters, and they are usually quoted by critics, on the rare occasions on which his poetry is discussed, as an instance of the curious incapacity of artists to practise what they preach.  But the truth is that Beddoes was not a ’creeper into worm-holes,’ he was not even a ‘reviver’; he was a reincarnation.  Everything that we know of him goes to show that the laborious and elaborate effort of literary reconstruction was quite alien to his spirit.  We have Kelsall’s evidence as to the ease and abundance of his composition; we have the character of the man, as it shines forth in his letters and in the history of his life—­records of a ’bold, trampling fellow,’ if ever there was one; and we have the evidence of his poetry itself.  For the impress of a fresh and vital intelligence is stamped unmistakably upon all that is best in his work.  His mature blank verse is perfect.  It is not an artificial concoction galvanized into the semblance of life; it simply lives.  And, with Beddoes, maturity was precocious, for he obtained complete mastery over the most difficult and dangerous of metres at a wonderfully early age.  Blank verse is like the Djin in the Arabian Nights; it is either the most terrible of masters, or the most powerful of slaves.  If you have not the magic secret, it will take your best thoughts, your bravest imaginations, and change them into toads and fishes; but, if the spell be yours, it will turn into a flying carpet and lift your simplest utterance into the highest heaven.  Beddoes had mastered the ‘Open, Sesame’ at an age when most poets are still mouthing ineffectual wheats and barleys.  In his twenty-second year, his thoughts filled and moved and animated his blank verse as easily and familiarly as a hand in a glove.  He wishes to compare, for instance, the human mind, with its knowledge of the past, to a single eye receiving the light of the stars; and the object of the comparison is to lay stress upon the concentration on one point of a vast multiplicity of objects.  There could be no better exercise for a young verse-writer than to attempt his own expression of this idea, and then to examine these lines by Beddoes—­lines where simplicity and splendour have been woven together with the ease of accomplished art.