These letters have already been much reviewed; I briefly endorse, and need not repeat in detail, the well-deserved compliments which have been paid to their editor and their publishers. I can best show my sense of the book’s importance by treating some questions which a first reading has suggested.

It is natural to refer at once to those passages in the letters which discuss the technique of poetry, and especially the technique of Father Hopkins himself. Many readers, I think, have found obscurities in the author’s preface to his poems; and here some of the letters of Dixon are of great help. It is good, for instance, to have the vague reference to nursery rhymes supplemented by an analysis of Ding Dong Bell. Two unsatisfactory things remain. One is the use of the name ‘counterpoint’ for inversion of accent—this is hardly a difficulty, but it is an abuse of terms. The other is really a difficulty—an inconsistency in the use of the very important term ‘sprung rhythm.’ In one letter Hopkins says: ‘This then is the essence of sprung rhythm; one stress makes one foot, no matter how many or few the syllables’; later he says: ‘The word Sprung which I use for this rhythm means something like abrupt and applies by rights only where one stress follows another running, without syllable between.’