Nobody who comes fresh from El Dorado and “The Lesser Children” (a poem published in The Atlantic Monthly) can say that Mr. Ridgely Torrence has not achieved, and achieved excellently; but he has not yet found himself and his place in literature. He has as yet put forth little. His first published work, The House of the Hundred Lights (his Rubáiyát), a slender volume of quatrains written in frank imitation of Omar Khayyám, has no note of his originality, but displays a certain aptitude in assimilating style. Each verse has the neatness of an epigram:—

Yes, he that wove the skein of Stars
and poured out all the seas that are
Is Wheel and Spinner and the Flax,
and Boat and Steersman and the Star.
What! doubt the Master Workman's hand
because my fleshly ills increase?
No; for there still remains one chance
that I am not His Masterpiece.
Though man or angel judge my life
and read it like an open scroll,
And weigh my heart, I have a judge
more just than any—my own soul.

Mr. Torrence has definitely essayed the poetic drama. His El Dorado has much in it besides the mere facile exuberance of youth; there is color and vision and the sweep of action. The characters are nobly planned, and there is one fine tragic figure, Perth, the prisoner released after thirty years in a dungeon. He desires to recapture his lost youth, as the adventurer Coronado desires to capture the Seven Cities of Gold. Over the whole drama there is the golden light and rosy mist of youth; it is the drama of youth and of youth's disillusionment. There is a fine scene where Coronado and his host come within sight of the enchanted cities:—

Perth. The veil seems slowly
to withdraw.
Cor.                                                                                  I see it!
A Voice. What?
Cor. (To Perth) Look—far down!
Perth. The mist seems coloured there.
Cor. It glows! It is no mist! Can
you not
see
The gem which is the mother of all dawn?
Perth. There is some gleam.
Car.                                                    It waits
one moment yet
Before it thunders upon our blinded sight!
(To Soldiers) Choose what you will,
O you
whose blood has bought it!
Out of all that which waits our famished eyes!
Bright, barren sands of gold, which shall be
fertile!
Jewels that welter like great fallen suns!
The living heat that smoulders in deep rubies,
The endless April of cool emeralds
And chrysoprase within whose heart the sky
Kisses the sea! The sullen mystery
Of opals holding captive sunsets past!
And diamonds fashioned from the frozen souls
Of lilies once alive!

The structure of the verse is sonorous and correct; there is the promise of that gift of phrasing which Mr. Torrence has developed so admirably in “The Lesser Children:”—

“And now, in that far edge, as though a seed
Were sown, there is a hint of budding grey,
A bud not wholly innocent of night
And yet a colour.”
                                                                                “And now
With sleep and all old dreams and visions
dead
Day takes all Heaven's citadels.”
“Never the moon nor any drifting star
Brought you so hallowed and white.”

El Dorado has the charm of youth; it has also the amiable faults of youth, youth's fluency, youth's feverishness, youth's audacity. The effect of the drama is, on the whole, spectacular rather than orchestral; it leaves an impression of clever grouping, of the vast movements of masses on a splendid background. But the psychology is mainly a thing of general terms. The characters conceal their souls under a wreath of imagery, under phrases that are like flung flowers, till we long for the simple half-articulate utterance of human passion. The ravings of Perth, conceived with absolute truth, are not conveyed in the language of genuine delirium. This falsification through fancy is the snare that Poetic Drama lays for her votaries. Their temptation is to be too “poetic,” and it is Mr. Torrence's special danger, for the worst enemy of his imagination is his fancy. It is always lying in wait for him in those weaker moments when imagination fails.

Mr. Torrence was greatly daring when he chose for his next essay the ode. The structure of the ode makes more exhausting demands upon the poet than any other form. It absolutely requires a long and sustained flight of imagination; it is the superior test of metrical plasticity. Mr. Torrence was daring, too, in choosing for his ode (“The Lesser Children”) so slight a subject as the slaughter of the birds. But he has grasped his subject with so superb a sweep of imagination that it becomes great in his hands. His verse beats with the palpitating life of the winged and lyric creatures of the woods and of the air:—

What saw I then, what heard?
Multitudes, multitudes, under the moon they
stirred!
The weaker brothers of our earthly breed;
Watchmen of whom our safety takes no heed;
Swift helpers of the wind that sowed the seed
Before the first field was or any fruit;
Warriors against the bivouac of the weed;
Earth's earliest ploughmen for the tender root,
All came about my head and at my feet
A thousand, thousand sweet,
With starry eyes not even raised to plead;
Bewildered, driven, hiding, fluttering, mute!
And I beheld and saw them one by one
Pass and become as nothing in the night.
Clothed on with red they were who once were
white;
Drooping, who once led armies to the sun,
Of whom the lowly grass now topped the
flight:
In scarlet faint who once were brave in brown;
Climbers and builders of the silent town,
Creepers and burrowers all in crimson dye,
Winged mysteries of song that from the sky
Once dashed long music down.
.....Who has not seen in the high gulf of light
What, lower, was a bird, but now
Is moored and altered quite
Into an island of unshaded joy?
To whom the mate below upon the bough
Shouts once and brings him from his high
employ.
Yet speeding he forgot not of the cloud
Where he from glory sprang and burned
aloud.
But took a little of the day,
A little of the coloured sky,
And of the joy that would not stay
He wove a song that cannot die.
.....O little lovers,
If you would still have nests beneath the sun
Gather your broods about you and depart,
Before the stony forward-pressing faces
Into the lands bereft of any sound;
The solemn and compassionate desert places.

There are signs in this poem of the chastening and purging of the poet's imagination by the critical spirit, a spirit that here and there hangs a weight upon the mounting lyric. There are moments when imagination and emotion are not fused at white heat, moments when Mr. Torrence deliberates and is lost, wavers and strives to recover himself by snatching at some straw of a conceit. But the flaws are slight and few. The influence of the critical spirit has worked wholly for good. Mr. Torrence has exchanged his youthful infatuation with the first fair phrase for the unresting pursuit of the ideally fit. …

Mr. Torrence, having left Omar Khayyám far behind him, is inspired by no spirit but his own, and he is forming, a little too deliberately, a style of his own. With all his reverence for old traditions, he is in his own way an iconoclast, a breaker of revered metrical forms. The old rhythms, made malleable by the touch of many masters, become yet more plastic in his hands. He is happy if he can find a new cæsura; he delights in the rippling of the old smooth measure, in feet that patter in delicate triplets to one beat. He loves to wed words according to their spiritual affinities, regardless of custom and of law. There is no doubt that he has before him a brilliant future. He works in the spirit which great art inexorably demands, the spirit of reverence and of sacrificial patience. But because his art is precious, let him beware of preciosity.