He took a connoisseur's delight in the form and cadence, the pattern and the manipulation of words. The rich possibilities of ingenious rhyming fascinated him no less His joy in stringing together these jewels of sound was both the strength and ihe weakness of his poetry. Occasionally he overlaid his own mean-, ing with the fertility of his phrasing; but when he had this extreme inventiveness well in check, as in his long poem, "Requiem," the diction and. passion of his verse were so well matched as io achieve most memorable results He was consistently happy with brief lyrics, quatrains, and rhymed epigrams, for in them discipline was enforced upon a mind which could be betrayed by its own uncanny speed and fluency. To the noble economy of the Greek Anthology he could respond with a spare beauty of his own, He wrote several volumes of short pieces and epigrams, of which "This Blind Rose" is perhaps the best known.
Humbert Wolfe in all that he touched showed the quickness and exuberance of his race, But this cleverness, and his delight in the use of it, sometirhes obscured the fact that beneath this shining crust of words lay great intensity and integrity of feeling. He both wrote and jested with facility. But he looked into his heart to write.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.