He composed with all his faculties, mental, emotional, and physical, at the utmost strain, at a white heat of intense fervour, striving to attain one object, the truest and most passionate investiture for the thoughts which had inflamed his ever-quick imagination.

The result is that his finest work has more the stamp of something natural and elemental--the wind, the sea, the depth of air--than of a mere artistic product.

Plato would have said: the Muses filled this man with sacred madness, and, when he wrote, he was no longer in his own control.

There was, moreover, ever-present in his nature an effort, an aspiration after a better than the best this world can show, which prompted him to blend the choicest products of his thought and fancy with the fairest images borrowed from the earth on which he lived.

He never willingly composed except under the impulse to body forth a vision of the love and light and life which was the spirit of the power he worshipped.