"Mr. Phillips has written a great dramatic poem which happens also to be a great poetic drama. We are justified in speaking of Mr. Phillips' achievement as something without parallel in our age."-Mr. OWEN SEAMAN in Morning Post. "That Mr. Phillips will go on to give us plays that are both plays and poems, and so to enrich what is, after all, the most glorious dramatic literature in the world-wider and deeper than that of the Greeks, and nobler than that of Francewe do not doubt. His play shows that he has in him the capacity which was once 'so ancient and so eminent' among us."-The Spectator. "All that Mr. Phillips has written possesses a wonderful tenderness, a grace, a limpidity that is most rare: sometimes he finds poignant epithets and images that stab the memory with inarticulate regrets."-The Speaker. "He has attempted the bravest and most difficult vehicle in literary art, the supreme accomplishment for poets at any time, and he has succeeded."-The Outlook. "It fulfils, as no great poem of our day has yet fulfilled, the primary demands of a stage play. I know no work of modern times, no actors' drama of any age, that better combines the passion and glamor of romance with the restraint of classic traditions."-Punch. "Much might confidently have been expected from the author of 'The Wife,' and of 'Marpessa,' but I must frankly own that, magnificent as was the promise of these poems, I was not prepared for such an achievement as the present work. It unquestionably places Mr. Phillips in the first rank of modern dramatists and of modern poetry. It does more, it claims his kinship with the aristocrats of his art: with Sophocles and with Dante." Mr. CHURTON COLLINS in The Saturday Review. "This is a tragedy written by a poet who has been an actor, and it is conceived in the best spirit of the modern stage, severe and simple, yet tense with dramatic emotion. Mr. Phillips has broken absolutely with the Elizabethan models. He has gone back to the classic tradition of the drama, which, beginning in Greece, has been continued through the French-though in France its highest successes have been attained with comedy. As a poet, indeed, he achieves in his verse that half lyrical beauty which marks the Elizabethans; but as a dramatist he has more kinship with Racine than with Shakespeare."—Literature. "A thing of surprising beauty and power, free from the shortcomings of the author's previous work, and testifying to his possession of quite unsuspected gifts. To the rich poetical production of the nineteenth century it seems to me that Mr. Phillips has added that which was hitherto lacking-notwithstanding so many attempts made by famous men—namely, a poetical play of the highest quality, strictly designed for, and expressly suited to, the stage. Apprehension lest a modern hand should be found once more merely fumbling with the theme of Dante gives way, as one reads, to pleasure and surprise, that the theme should be capable of being rehandled so nobly and strikingly." Mr. SIDNEY COLVIN in Nineteenth Century. "It is a fine creation, full of passion and tenderness and poetry the rare and notable talents which gave us Marpessa,' 'The Woman with the Dead Soul,' and the lyrics of the poet's former volume, has laid a new and equal claim in 'Paolo and Francesca' upon the gratitude of all who care to see high ideals pursued with an exacting craftmanship in English poetry."-Manchester Guardian. 'Steeped in the spirit of romantic tragedy, the atmosphere of dread things to come being produced at the outset ; and the blank verse abounding in at once sonorous and deeply pregnant lines and passages that have the real Elizabethan ring about them.”—The Stage. JOHN LANE, LONDON AND NEW YORK. SOME PRESS NOTICES OF POEMS BY STEPHEN PHILLIPS Sixth Edition, Uniform with "Paolo and Francesca." To Mr. STEPHEN PHILLIPS was awarded, by "In 'Marpessa' he has demonstrated what I should hardly have thought demonstrable—that another poem can be finer than 'Christ in Hades.' I had long believed, and my belief was shared by not a few, that the poetic possibilities of classic myth were exhausted, yet the youngest of our poets takes this ancient story and makes it newly beautiful, kindles it into tremulous life, clothes it with the mystery of interwoven delight and pain, and in the best sense keeps it classic all the while."-WILLIAM WATSON in the Fortnightly. "The accent here is unmistakable, it is the accent of a new and true poet. Nature and passion pretend to be speaking, and nature and passion really speak. A poet of whom this may be said with truth has passed the line which divides talent from genius, the true singer from the accomplished artist or imitator. He has taken his place among authentic poets. To that high honour the present volume undoubtedly entitles Mr. Phillips. We may predict with confidence that he has a great future before him. It may be safely said that no poet has made his debut with a volume which is at once of extraordinary merit and so rich in promise. The awful story narrated in 'The Wife' is conceived and embodied with really Dantesque intensity and vividness; it has the master's suggestive reservation, smiting phrase, and clairvoyant picture-wording. The idea in the lines, 'To Milton, Blind,' is worthy of Milton's own sublime conceit that the darkness which had fallen on his eyes was but the shadow of God's protecting wings." Mr. J. CHURTON COLLINS in the Pall Mall Gazette. "This volume has made more noise than any similar publication since Alexander Smith shot his rocket skyward. But in this case the genius is no illusion. There are passages here which move with the footfall of the immortals, stately lines with all the music and the meaning of the highest poetry."-THE ONLOOKER, in Blackwood's Magazine. "The man who, with a few graphic touches, can call up for us images like these, in such decisive and masterly fashion, is not one to be rated with the common herd, but rather as a man from whom we have the right to expect hereafter some of the great things which will endure." Mr. W. L. COURTNEY in Daily Telegraph. 'He sees clearly, feels intensely, and writes beautifully; in a word he is a true poet."-WILLIAM ARCHER in the Outlook. · "Till The Woman with the Dead Soul' and 'The Wife' there was only one London poem, Rossetti's 'Jenny'; now there are three. 'Marpessa' contains one of the loveliest and most impassioned love-speeches in English poetry. Mr. Phillips is a poet already of noble performance and exciting promise. Poetry so full of the beauty of reality, so unweakened by rhetoric, the song of a real nightingale in love with a real rose, poetry so distinguished by the impassioned accuracy of high imagination, I know not where else to find among the poets of Mr. Phillips' generation." Mr. RICHARD LE GALLIENNE in The Sketch. "Mr. Phillips is a poet, one of the half-dozen men of the younger generation, whose writings contain the indefinable quality which makes for permanence.”—Times. "We may pay Mr. Phillips the distinguished compliment of saying that his blank verse is finer than his work in rhyme. . . . Almost the whole of this book is concerned with life and death, largely and liberally contemplated; it is precisely that kind of contemplation which our recent poetry lacks. 'Poetry,' says Coleridge once more, 'is the blossom and the fragrancy of all human knowledge, human thoughts, human passions, emotion, knowledge.' It should not be didactic, it cannot help being moral: it must not be instructive, but it must needs be educative. It is, as it were, the mind of man in excelsis,' caught into a world of light. We praise Mr. Phillips for many excellences, but chiefly for the great air and ardour of his poetry, its persistent loftiness." Daily Chronicle. "In his new volume Mr. Stephen Phillips more than fulfils the promise made by his Christ in Hades': here is real poetic achievement - the veritable gold of song."—Spectator. 66 'How should language, without the slightest strain, express more? It has an almost physical effect upon the reader, in the opening of the eyes, and the dilation of the heart. Academy. "But the success of the year is the volume of poems by Mr. Stephen Phillips, which has been received with a chorus of applause which recall the early triumphs of Swinburne and Tennyson."-Westminster Gazette. 'No such remarkable book of verse as this has appeared for several years. Mr. Phillips boldly challenges comparison, in style and subject, with the work of the great masters; the writers whom he makes you think of range up to Milton, and |