The stanzas reminded him forcibly of one of the greatest poets of the century.
Gifted flushed hot with pleasure.

He had tasted the blood of his own rhymes; and when a poet gets as far as that, it is like wringing the bag of exhilarating gas from the lips of a fellow sucking at it, to drag his piece away from him.
"Perhaps you will like these lines still better," he said; "the style is more modern:-- "'O daughter of the spiced South, Her bubbly grapes have spilled the wine That staineth with its hue divine The red flower of thy perfect mouth.'" And so on, through a series of stanzas like these, with the pulp of two rhymes between the upper and lower crust of two others.
Clement was cornered.

It was necessary to say something for the poet's sake,--perhaps for Susan's; for she was in a certain sense responsible for the poems of a youth of genius, of whom she had spoken so often and so enthusiastically.
"Very good, Mr.Hopkins, and a form of verse little used, I should think, until of late years.

You modelled this piece on the style of a famous living English poet, did you not ?" "Indeed I did not, Mr.Lindsay,--I never imitate.

Originality is, if I may be allowed to say so much for myself, my peculiar forte.