old men with their beards torn off and their eyes gouged out, of young men imprisoned in reeking cesspools and impaled with red-hot spits.  Again and again his passionate and daring genius attains the utmost limit and rounds the final goal of tragedy; never once does it break the bounds of pure poetic instinct.  If ever for a moment it may seem to graze that goal too closely, to brush too sharply by those bounds, the very next moment finds it clear of any such risk and remote from any such temptation as sometimes entrapped or seduced the foremost of its forerunners in the field.  And yet this is the field in which its paces are most superbly shown.  No name among all the names of great poets will recur so soon as Webster’s to the reader who knows what it signifies, as he reads or repeats the verses in which a greater than this great poet—­a greater than all since Shakespeare—­has expressed the latent mystery of terror which lurks in all the highest poetry or beauty, and distinguishes it inexplicably and inevitably from all that is but a little lower than the highest.

Les aigles sur les bords du Gange et du Caystre
Sont effrayants;
Rien de grand qui ne soit confusement sinistre;
Les noirs paeans,

Les psaumes, la chanson monstrueuse du mage
Ezechiel,
Font devant notre oeil fixe errer la vague image
D’un affreux ciel.

L’empyree est l’abime, on y plonge, on y reste
Avec terreur. 
Car planer, c’est trembler; si l’azur est celeste,
C’est par l’horreur.

L’epouvante est au fond des choses les plus belles;
Les bleus vallons
Font parfois reculer d’effroi les fauves ailes
Des aquilons.

And even in comedy as in tragedy, in prosaic even as in prophetic inspiration, in imitative as in imaginative works of genius, the sovereign of modern poets has detected the same touch of terror wherever the deepest note possible has been struck, the fullest sense possible of genuine and peculiar power conveyed to the student of lyric or dramatic, epic or elegiac masters.

De la tant de beautes difformes dans leurs oeuvres;
Le vers charmant
Est par la torsion subite des couleuvres
Pris brusquement;

A de certains moments toutes les jeunes flores
Dans la foret
Out peur, et sur le front des blanches metaphores
L’ombre apparait;

C’est qu’Horace ou Virgile out vu soudain le spectre
Noir se dresser;
C’est que la-bas, derriere Amaryllis, Electre
Vient de passer.

Nor was it the Electra of Sophocles, the calm and impassive accomplice of an untroubled and unhesitating matricide, who showed herself ever in passing to the intent and serious vision of Webster.  By those candid and sensible judges to whom the praise of Marlowe seems to imply a reflection on the fame of Shakespeare, I may be accused—­and by such critics I am content to be accused—­of a fatuous design to set Webster beside Sophocles, or Sophocles—­for