Page:Essays and phantasies by James Thomson.djvu/333

3Ss tft0 same ^utfior. THE CITY OF DREADFUL NIGHT, AND OTHER POEMS. London: REEVES & TURNER, 196 Strand. Price '^s.; large paper copies^ os. OPINIONS OP THE PRESS. " George Eliot" to the unknown author of " The City of Dreadful Night "; "The Priory, 21 North Bank, Regent's Park, JAzy 30, 1874. "Dear Poet, — I cannot rest satisfied without telling you that my mind responds with admiration to the distinct vision and grand utterance in the poem which you have been so good as to send me. "Also, I trust that an intellect informed by so much passionate energy as yours will soon give us more heroic strains with a wider embrace of human fellowship in them — such as will be to the labourers of the world what the odes of Tyrtaeus were to the Spartans, thrilling them with the sublimity of the social order and the courage of resistance to all that would dissolve it. . . . — Yours sincerely, M. E. Lewes," " It is at least ten years since a real unmistakable poet has revealed himself in England. Mr. Swinburne's ' Atalanta ' was published in 1865, Mr. Morris's 'Jason ' in 1868, Mr, Rossetti's poems were pub- lished for the world in 1870, and even then the most precious of them were not exactly new. A year ago one might have said, with- out any disrespect to many accomplished writers whose work is often praiseworthy and sometimes enjoyable, that one lost little or nothing in neglecting any living English poet except the three already named and Mr, Tennyson and Mr. Browning, whose fame has been safe and sealed these twenty years. I