"I did best," he said, "when I had least truth for my subject." His love poetry was written in his turbulent and brilliant youth, and the poetic talent which made it turned in his later years to express itself in hymns and religious poetry.

But there is no essential distinction between the two halves of his work.

It is all of a piece.
The same swift and subtle spirit which analyses experiences of passion, analyses, in his later poetry, those of religion.

His devotional poems, though they probe and question, are none the less never sermons, but rather confessions or prayers.

His intense individuality, eager always, as his best critic has said, "to find a North-West passage of his own,"[2] pressed its curious and sceptical questioning into every corner of love and life and religion, explored unsuspected depths, exploited new discovered paradoxes, and turned its discoveries always into poetry of the closely-packed artificial style which was all its own.