Faerie Queene, Chaucer and his successors—­the Scottish poets of the 15th and 16th Centuries, The Morte d’Arthur, the authorised version of the Bible and North’s Plutarch have always lain at his elbow.  Then, too, with Dante, Shakespeare and Heine’s poems he is supersaturated; but the authorised version of the Bible has had more influence on him than any other book, and he has so loved and studied it from boyhood that he had assimilated its processes and learned the secrets of the interior mechanism of its style.  It is not surprising that his first publication should have been a book of poetry.  The merits of The Masque of Shadows and other Poems were acknowledged on all sides.  It was seen that the art of ballad writing—­which Goethe calls the most difficult of arts—­was not, as some averred, a forgotten one.  The Masque of Shadows itself is melodious and vivid from the first line to the end, but the captain jewel is the necromantic and thrilling Rime of Redemption—­the story of a woman who erred and of a man who prayed and wrestled with God in prayer for her, and ultimately wrung her salvation by self-sacrifice from Divine Justice.  Here and there are passages that we could have wished modified, but surely such a terrific fantasy was never before penned!  It is as harrowing as The Ancient Mariner, and appeals to one more forcibly than Coleridge’s “Rime,” because it seems actual truth.  Other volumes, containing impassioned ballads, lyrics, narrative poems and sonnets, came from Mr. Payne’s pen.  His poems have the rush and bound of a Scotch waterfall.  This is explained by the fact that they are written in moments of physical and mental exaltation.  Only a mind in a quasi-delirious state, to be likened to that of the pythoness on the tripod, could have evolved the Rime of Redemption[FN#345] or Thorgerda[FN#346].  No subject comes amiss to him.  His chemic power turns everything to gold.  “He sees everything,” as Mr. Watts-Dunton once said to the writer—­“through the gauze of poetry.”  His love for beautiful words and phrases leads him to express his thoughts in the choicest language.  He puts his costliest wine in myrrhine vases; he builds his temple with the lordliest cedars.  Mr. Payne does not write for the multitude, but few poets of the day have a more devoted band of admirers.  Some readers will express a preference for The Building of the Dream,[FN#347] others for Lautrec[FN#348] or Salvestra[FN#349], and others for the dazzling and mellifluous Prelude to Hafiz.  Mr. A. C. Swinburne eulogised the “exquisite and clear cut Intaglios."[FN#350] D. G. Rossetti revelled in the Sonnets; Theodore de Banville, “roi des rimes,” in the Songs of Life and Death, whose beauties blend like the tints in jewels.[FN#351]