flying of us, seems to us sweet of us and
                    swiftly away with, done away with, undone,
  Undone, done with, soon done with, and yet clearly and dangerously sweet
  Of us, the wimpled-water-dimpled, not-by-morning-matched face,
  The flower of beauty, fleece of beauty, too too apt to, ah! to fleet,
  Never fleets more, fastened with the tenderest truth
  To its own best being and its loveliness of youth....’

Than this, Hopkins truly wrote, ‘I never did anything more musical.’  By his own verdict and his own standards it is therefore the finest thing that Hopkins did.  Yet even here, where the general beauty is undoubted, is not the music too obvious?  Is it not always on the point of degenerating into a jingle—­as much an exhibition of the limitations of a poetical theory as of its capabilities?  The tyranny of the ’avant toute chose’ upon a mind in which the other things were not stubborn and self-assertive is apparent.  Hopkins’s mind was irresolute concerning the quality of his own poetical ideal.  A coarse and clumsy assonance seldom spread its snare in vain.  Exquisite openings are involved in disaster:—­

’When will you ever, Peace, wild wood dove, shy wings shut,
Your round me roaming end, and under be my boughs? 
When, when, Peace, will you, Peace?  I’ll not play hypocrite
To own my heart:  I yield you do come sometimes; but
That piecemeal peace is poor peace.  What pure peace....’

And the more wonderful opening of ‘Windhover’ likewise sinks, far less disastrously, but still perceptibly:—­

’I caught this morning morning’s minion, kingdom of daylight’s dauphin,
dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,
As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend:  the hurl and the gliding
Rebuffed the big wind.  My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird,—­the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!’

We have no doubt that ‘stirred for a bird’ was an added excellence to the poet’s ear; to our sense it is a serious blemish on lines which have ‘the roll, the rise, the carol, the creation.’

There is no good reason why we should give characteristic specimens of the poet’s obscurity, since our aim is to induce people to read him.  The obscurities will slowly vanish and something of the intention appear; and they will find in him many of the strange beauties won by men who push on to the borderlands of their science; they will speculate whether the failure of his whole achievement was due to the starvation of experience which his vocation imposed upon him, or to a fundamental vice in his poetical endeavour.  For ourselves we believe that the former was the true cause.  His ‘avant toute chose’ whirling dizzily in a spiritual vacuum, met with no salutary resistance to modify, inform, and strengthen it.  Hopkins told the truth of himself—­the reason why he must remain a poets’ poet:—­