Mr. Woodberry's sonnet sequence [Ideal Passion] has the frail beauty of perfumed summer days, days spent in an old garden, out of range of the winds of the world. The garden is formally patterned but softly overgrown—a sweet refuge for a sensitive solitary soul. In its paths, beside its mossy marble finials, a poet may live in the spirit and be indulgent of dream. He may see the light that never was, and celebrate a mystic marriage with a lady too fine and fair for flesh; and then, dreaming himself into etherealized passion, he may weave a fabric of poesy in her praise.

Indeed, the suggestion of the book is monastic. The poet took the vows early, and his life has been expurgated of all common things. He is monkish in both his distaste for the world and his rapture of spiritual emotion. Mrs. Henderson, four years ago in Poetry, characterized one of Mr. Woodberry's poems as "the tragic experience of a conventional soul facing unconventionality—life." But the attempt was not only tragic but abortive—Mr. Woodberry has never really faced life; he could not. And the present poem, recording a frank withdrawal, is perhaps the truest expression we have had of his delicate, bookish, meditative soul.

It has fineness of form and phrase, perfect finish, polish. It is an expert modern handling of old forms, old fashions, old ideals. It has the pathetic and somewhat futile beauty of a fine lady of the old régime, revisiting the glimpses of the moon in these days of war and slang and bad manners, and feeling out of place as she confesses virginal ecstasies. Mr. Woodberry has never lived in his own time, and the penalty he pays is that nothing his art fashions can have quite the quality of an authentic original. No one today can quite "put over" a Louis XV Sevres plate or a Donatello alter, or a sonnet sequence of disembodied and ecstatic passion. The moment for those things is gone; our attempts at them have the flavor of a revival, a reproduction. Their sincerities are bookish sincerities, ardors for truth to type and period—not life but literature.

This sonnet, for example, is almost, but not quite, Sir Philip Sidney:

Full gently then Love laid me on his breast,
And kissed me, cheek and hands and lips and
  brow,
So sweetly that I do remember now
The wonder of it, and the unexpressed,
Infinite honor wherewith his eyes caressed
Youth in my soul, then ripening to the vow
That binds us; and he said to me: "Sleep, thou;
One comes who brings to thee eternal rest."

I know not how in that dread interval
My lady did herself to me make known,
So deep a slumber did upon me fall;
I woke to know her being in my own,
The nameless mystery whereon I call
When every hope hath from my bosom flown.

"Sonnet XVII" is a still franker expression of monastic rapture. Perhaps "XXXI" is the furthest of all from that mood—a fine tribute of gratitude for royal lineage:

The kings of thought and lords of chivalry
Knighted me in great ages long ago.