SOURCE: “Robert Bridges,” in his Oxford Lectures on Poetry, Oxford University Press, 1934 (and reprinted by Books for Libraries Press, Inc., 1967), pp. 207-32.

In the following essay, De Selincourt describes the central theme in Bridges's poetry as the beauty of nature and compares Bridges's treatment of this theme with that of other poets such as Keats, Browning, and Swinburne.

Only a few months before his death Mr. Bridges bequeathed to us his Testament of Beauty. That great poem was, as he said, ‘the intimate echo’ of his life; it reflected his alert interest in the intellectual movement of his time, his deep knowledge and love of nature and the arts, his lyrical ecstasy, his pregnant humour, his fastidious taste—all that went to make up his lofty, distinguished personality. No revelation of the poetic mind, so complete and so illuminating, had appeared since Wordsworth's Prelude. The warmth of its...