[In the following review, the critic praises Benson as a minor poet whose work “just misses greatness.”]

From his six books of verse, ranging in date from 1892 to 1905, Mr. Benson has selected enough for a single comfortable volume [The Poems of Arthur Christopher Benson.] He himself, we presume, would not disdain the title of minor poet, if that phrase were spoken with a friendly smile. His work is minor in the better sense that it is unpretentious, and that it is replete with conscious reminiscences. Indeed, it might almost be sufficiently characterized by calling it a mixture of Tennyson and Matthew Arnold. This derivative quality is at times annoying, especially in the lyrical poems of nature, of which there are somewhat too many in the volume. Here and there, no doubt, a line or a passage of natural description justifies itself by its first-hand vividness, as when he speaks of

                    … thridding the trackless hill,
O'er tumbled cataracts of shapeless stones—

but for the most part he does not in this genre rise much above the level of magazine respectability. It is different in the poems of reflection. Here such echoes are an integral part of the poet's mood and an essential factor of his art.

This musing habit of one to whom all things have already been thought and felt and expressed, who sits within a magic circle of memories, too weak or too indifferent or too wise to break through the ring into the world of cruder or more immediate emotion—it might seem that such a mood would appeal to few readers; yet we have the undeniable fact that Mr. Benson's prose is widely bought and read. There will be fewer purchasers for his verse, of course; but for those who know, it will have the finer and more enduring flavor. If truth must be told, his prose has grown a little stale from repetition, and its aimlessness has become more pronounced from diffusion. On the contrary, the verse is of little bulk, and, if it also lacks any definite outcome, it has at least just that strong personal note which might have atoned in the prose for the lacking qualities of creative force. There is something astringent in the self-revelation of such a sonnet as “Imagination,” with its disillusioned close:

The rapture fades; the fitful flame flares
                              out,
          Leaving me sad, and something less than
                              man,
          Pent in the circle of a rugged isle,
          A later Prospero, without his smile,
Without his large philosophy, without
          Miranda, and alone with Caliban.

That note was needed in such a book as Beside the Still Waters to bring out the ennui which is the sure result of stagnant revery. And in like manner the shadowy kind of peace there sought—not la pace that Dante asked for in the cloister, but its dream likeness—is nowhere in his prose so well intimated as in such a sonnet as this:

Spire, that from half-a-hundred dainty
                              lawns,
          O'er battlemented wall and privet-fence,
          Dost brood and muse with mild indiffer-
                              ence,
Through golden eves and ragged gusty
                              dawns:—
O cloistered court, O immemorial towers,
          O archways, filled from mouldering edge
                              to edge
          With sober sunshine, O bird-haunted ledge,
Say, have ye seen her? Shall she soon be
                              ours?
She, whom we seek, most dear when most
                              denied,
          Seen but by sidelong glances, past us
                              slips,
                    Waves from a window, beckons from
                              a door,
Calls from a thicket by the minster-side,
          Presses a flying finger to her lips,
                    Smiles her sad smile, and passes on be-
                              fore.

In those fourteen lines is the essence of all his books, the undefined emotion that comes from the reading of his prose, here defined by the reality of a personal experience. In the longer poems, “Thomas Gray” and “In the Iron Cage,” the same confession becomes dramatic and just misses greatness.