The Bridling of Pegasus Part 6

We do not propose to traverse the entire field of controversy here lightly indicated; our purpose being to confine ourselves to a consideration of Mr. Arnold's particular conclusion, that Wordsworth's poetry should be placed above Byron's. But before pa.s.sing to that duty, we may say, parenthetically, that though we agree with Mr. Arnold that Sh.e.l.ley's poetry often exhibits a lamentable "want of sound subject-matter," the claims of the "beautiful and ineffectual angel" are here somewhat summarily dismissed; and that when Mr. Arnold says further that he "doubts whether Sh.e.l.ley's delightful Essays and Letters, which deserve to be far more read than they are now, will not resist the wear and tear of time better, and finally come to stand higher than his poetry," he makes us lift our eyes in sheer amazement, and somewhat more than doubt whether this will not prove to be among the utterly falsified prophecies of very able critics.

Holding the opinion he does concerning Wordsworth and Byron, Mr. Arnold has published a selection from the works of both, in distinct and separate volumes, and he believes that he has thereby rendered an equal service to each. "Alone," he writes, "among our poets of the earlier part of this century, Byron and Wordsworth not only furnish material enough for a volume of this kind, but also, it seems to me, they both of them gain considerably by being thus exhibited." We, on the contrary, submit that if the comparison is to end here, and is to be confined to the results produced by Mr. Arnold's method, a more unjust and inadequate method, as far as Byron is concerned, could not possibly be resorted to. Wordsworth gains considerably, but Byron loses considerably, to employ Mr. Arnold's language, by being thus exhibited. No doubt, Mr. Arnold means to be just.

He always means to be just. But in the very description he gives of the contents of these two volumes on their respective t.i.tle-pages, does he not betray a sort of unconscious consciousness that he is dealing with two very different poets, and with two poets whose works are very different?

If this be not so, how comes it that he calls one volume _"Poems" of Wordsworth_, and the other _"Poetry" of Byron_? The distinction is a genuine one. Indeed, it is something more than genuine; it was inevitable, and Mr. Arnold was obliged to make it, if the t.i.tle of each volume was to describe its contents correctly. The best poems of Wordsworth are short, most of them remarkably short; and therefore, in a volume of selections from his works, they can without difficulty be presented in their integrity. The best poems of Byron, like the best poems of schylus, of Virgil, of Dante, of Shakespeare, of Milton, are of considerable length; and if selections from Byron are to be made, his best poems must be mutilated for the purpose. Mr. Arnold has mutilated them accordingly.

Thus, while intending to treat Wordsworth and Byron in precisely the same manner, he has treated them, and by the very conditions of the case could not help treating them, in an entirely different manner.

That Mr. Arnold has not been altogether insensible to this objection--and, indeed, with his calm and dispa.s.sionate penetration, he was not likely to be--is apparent not only in the different description he gives of the contents of the two volumes, on their respective t.i.tle-pages, but from certain observations in his prefatory essay upon Byron. When he says that "there are portions of Byron's poetry which are far higher in worth, and far more free from fault than others," or that "Byron cannot but be a gainer by having attention concentrated upon what is vivid, powerful, effective, in his work, and withdrawn from what is not so," he is, we would suggest, stating nothing more than a truism, or what is equally true of every poet. He is only beating the air, and hesitating to close with the real difficulty with which he feels himself confronted. But when he proceeds to urge that "Byron has not a great artist's profound and patient skill in combining an action or in developing a character,--a skill which we must watch and follow if we are to do justice to it," he shows that he feels it to be necessary to offer a defence for applying to Byron a treatment from which Byron may possibly suffer. We confess, with all our admiration for Mr. Arnold--and it is as deep as it is sincere--we have never been able to resist the suspicion that he is _tant soit peu_ a sophist; and surely it is sophistry, in the course of an attempt to show that Byron and Wordsworth each equally gain by the "selection" method of treatment, to urge, with that air of tranquil and well-bred triumph of which Mr. Arnold is so consummate a master, that "to take pa.s.sages from work produced as Byron's was, is a very different thing from taking pa.s.sages out of the _Oedipus_ or the _Tempest_ and deprives the poetry far less of its advantage"? For the question is not whether Sophocles, Shakespeare, and Byron may be treated ostensibly in the same manner by an editor of selections, without injustice being done to any of them, but whether Wordsworth and Byron can. That is the question; and it is not answered, but avoided, by altering the terms of the proposition.

What, therefore, really remains of this plea of Mr. Arnold's, this excuse for mutilating Byron's poems and presenting them in fragments, is the allegation that Byron is not, _above and before all things_, a great, patient, and systematic artist. That much may be granted; and no competent critic would deny it. But more cannot be granted than is strictly true; and candour equally demands that it should be admitted that though Byron was not long-suffering and far-reaching enough in the conception of his poems, nor careful and self-critical enough in their execution, he possessed at least enough of the instinct and the scope of the artist to produce works that cohere with themselves, and that have a unity of design sufficiently definite to mark it as something distinct from the mere succession of executed detail. Will Mr. Arnold seriously pretend that a more "vivid, powerful, and effective" impression is not created upon the mind by a perusal of the whole of _Manfred_, than by a perusal of portions of it, or of one or two dissociated Acts? Mr. Arnold turns Byron's own modest confessions against himself, and lays stress upon the avowal that the _Giaour_ is "a string of pa.s.sages." But if any one were, after due reflection, to maintain, that more justice is done to Byron by reading some of its pa.s.sages than by reading the whole of the poem, we confess we should be obliged to entertain some doubt as to his own instincts as an artist. For, where men like Byron are concerned, it is peculiarly true that the divinity of the Muse shapes their ends, rough-hew these how they may. Of every one of Byron's tales--the _Siege of Corinth_, _The Bride of Abydos_, _Parisina_--this is equally true. It has more than once been observed that _Childe Harold_ suffers from the fact that a period of eight years elapsed between the composition of the first and second cantos, and the composition of the third and fourth; and as far as style is concerned, the contrast is very striking, two of the cantos being for the most part almost as feeble, and two of them as forcible, as anything deserving the name of poetry well can be. Nevertheless, there would be no difficulty in showing, and we think no reader of poetry endowed with a fair amount of artistic sense would require to be shown, that a certain oneness of purpose and unity of drift presides over and accompanies the entire poem, in a word that it is substantially h.o.m.ogeneous; and if any one, after reading through the third and fourth cantos at a stretch, as we recently did, were to tell us that he thought a few extracts from each give an adequate conception of the two, and that reading portions is in effect equivalent to reading the whole, we should have reached that limit of controversy which is expressed by a silence that is not a.s.sent. It is true that Mr. Arnold has been fairly lavish in his extracts from _Childe Harold_; yet out of the 300 stanzas which compose the third and fourth cantos, his selection contains only 114, or little more than a third. But it is not only by the curtailment of the quant.i.ty, but by the treatment applied to what is selected, that injury is done to _Childe Harold_. The pa.s.sages quoted are scattered at intervals through the volume, so that all consecutiveness and coherence are lost. The majestic march of the poem is utterly broken. The subtle argument that lurks in the order of every poem--whether it be the _lucidus ordo_ of a speech, or an order less obvious and patent--is completely destroyed. The strain neither begins nor ends, neither rises nor falls, neither pauses nor progresses. The statue is s.h.i.+vered to pieces, and we are offered a collection of chips, mixed up with fragments from other marbles that have been treated with equal ruthlessness. Here there is a hand, here a portion of a foot, here a section of the features, here a bit of the torso. They still are magnificent, and full of suggestiveness. But are they equal and equivalent to the entire statue? Are they as good as the whole of the original work?

With surprising paradox Mr. Arnold a.s.sures us they are considerably better.

This singular conclusion is attained, it seems to us, by the excessive a.s.sertion, or at least by the exaggerated application, of a theory in which there is, unquestionably, a solid element of truth. We have said that Byron is not an austere and consistent artist. But that is not to affirm that he is not an artist at all; whereas, in thus treating his productions fragmentarily, Mr. Arnold acts as though such an a.s.sertion were true. Byron, says Mr. Arnold, is not "architectural." But is he not?

There is architecture, and architecture; the severe and systematic architecture of the Greeks, and the more free, irregular, unmethodical architecture which we know as Gothic. In the conception, and what in technical parlance is called the composition, of his works, Byron is a.s.suredly no Greek. The exquisite oneness of design characteristic of Athenian genius he certainly did not borrow from the land and the race no one has so splendidly extolled. But if we turn to some of the n.o.blest productions of Gothic architecture, what do we find? We find Cathedrals of unquestioned beauty and of universal fame, produced, it would superficially seem, almost haphazard; without design, without plan, even without architect. In our own land we may see Minsters that, begun in the eleventh, were not finished till the fifteenth century. Like _Childe Harold_, they bear the evident marks of different ages, and of different styles; and like _Don Juan_, they show that they were commenced without their parent knowing where or how they were to end. Nay, like it again, some of them remain unfinished to this day. But will any one affirm that their integrity, as they stand, is nothing to them, and nothing to us?

Because no great master-conception presided over their origin and their execution, will no injury be done to them by taking them to pieces, and saying, "Here is a lovely apse; here you see a beautiful flying b.u.t.tress; here contemplate an exquisite rood-screen; here you have an admirable bit of the choir, and there a glorious specimen of the roof"?

Nor can it be urged that this ill.u.s.tration does violence to the process Mr. Arnold has adopted. On the contrary, the a.n.a.logy is not strong enough; for _Manfred_, _The Corsair_, _Cain_, _Childe Harold_ itself, were conceived and executed, not less, but far more h.o.m.ogeneously, than the edifices with which we have compared them, and if it would be unjust and inadequate to treat Gothic cathedrals after this fas.h.i.+on, it is still more unjust and inadequate to treat Byron's poems after this fas.h.i.+on. More glaring still becomes the injustice, and more utter the inadequacy, when we remember in whose company he is so treated. Mr. Arnold does not break Wordsworth's poems to pieces and present us with the fragments; for there is no necessity to do so. The long ones Mr. Arnold cheerfully throws over, confessing that _The Excursion_ "can never be a satisfactory work to the disinterested lover of poetry," and even that Jeffrey was not wrong when he said of it, "This will never do." To adhere to our metaphor, it is a large comfortless Meeting-house; and so is the _Recluse_. The best of Wordsworth's poems, as we have said, and as Mr. Arnold says, are his short ones. There are charming English cottages, or, if it be preferred--for we have no intention of decrying them, we admire them vastly--exquisite little wayside chapels; and they fit conveniently into the s.p.a.ce, without being tampered with, which Mr. Arnold has provided for them. But the best of Byron's poems are the long ones; are vast Gothic edifices that soar high into the air and cover a vast amount of ground, and therefore cannot be compressed into the same compa.s.s. We have seen how Mr. Arnold gets over the difficulty. He pulls them down, places bits and sections of them side by side with the untouched cottages and still complete oratories of Wordsworth, and asks us to compare the two. We are far from saying that, even under these conditions, the comparison ends to Byron's disadvantage.

But it surely must be evident to every one that the conditions are not equal, and therefore, however fair were the intentions of the editor, that they are not really just. We should be sorry if any one supposed we consider Mr. Swinburne as sound a critic as Mr. Arnold. But, upon this particular question, Mr. Swinburne has propounded a conclusion against which, we submit, Mr. Arnold contends in vain. "The greatest of Byron's works was his whole work taken together." Nothing could be more terse or more true; and if Mr. Swinburne would be content always to form his judgments thus calmly and comprehensively, and to express them with this brevity and directness, he would soon come to exercise an authority which is at present refused by many to his literary verdicts.

But though, if the comparison inst.i.tuted between Byron and Wordsworth by Mr. Arnold were to be confined within the conditions he has imposed on both alike, great injustice would be done to Byron, it may well be doubted if the plan adopted by Mr. Arnold will really tend to Byron's disadvantage. On the contrary we suspect that, with the best will in the world to do all he can for Wordsworth, Mr. Arnold has done him rather an ill turn. For the whole, or anything approaching to the whole, of the best of Byron, is not to be found in the volume of selections edited by Mr.

Arnold; and everybody will feel that Byron is a far greater poet than he could possibly be made to appear by any such method. But all the best poetry of Wordsworth is in the volume Mr. Arnold dedicates to him; and we entertain little doubt that there is no dispa.s.sionate critic who would not be obliged to allow that a considerable portion, indeed we fear the greater portion of it, is not poetry at all. The process Mr. Arnold has applied to Wordsworth, will have to be applied over again, and with greater rigour. He has rejected as "not satisfactory work to the disinterested lover of poetry," an immense quant.i.ty of what Wordsworth conceived to be such. Another editor will have to reject a considerable proportion of what Mr. Arnold has too indulgently included. His selection will have to be selected from afresh; and thus, with doubtful friendliness, he has pointed and prepared the way for some entirely dispa.s.sionate critic who will leave of Wordsworth only what, to "the disinterested lover of poetry," is worth leaving; and this unfortunately, though of a high and delightful quality, will prove to be comparatively little. In a word, to do Byron anything like justice, we require several volumes of the size of that Mr. Arnold devotes to him; we require, in fact, most of what he wrote. To do Wordsworth justice, we require a volume less than half the size of what Mr. Arnold gives us; we require, in fact, to suppress at least three-fourths of what he wrote.

But, again, we can raise no question, and propound no conclusion which Mr.

Arnold, with his penetrating sense and acute susceptibility, has not himself more or less discerned. After observing, "we must be on our guard against Wordsworthians," he thus writes, in a vein of delicate humour:

I have spoken lightly of Wordsworthians: and if we are to get Wordsworth recognised by the public and by the world, we must recommend him not in the spirit of a clique, but in the spirit of disinterested lovers of poetry. But I am a Wordsworthian myself. I can read with pleasure and edification _Peter Bell_, and the whole series of _Ecclesiastical Sonnets_, and the addresses to Mr.

Wilkinson's spade, and even the _Thanksgiving Ode_; everything of Wordsworth, I think, except _Vaudracour and Julia_. It is not for nothing that one has been brought up in the veneration of a man so truly worthy of homage; that one has seen and heard him, lived in his neighbourhood, and been familiar with his country.

Alas! even the best of us are mortal; and we accept this graceful pa.s.sage as Mr. Arnold's confession that he, too, is a Wordsworthian against whom we must be on our guard. An extremist of a school he could not now be; but "it is not for nothing," as he says, that he was trained in it. "Once a priest," says an Italian proverb, "always a priest"; and, we fear, once a Wordsworthian, always a Wordsworthian. It is no reproach; but "we must be on our guard." For our part, we are tolerably familiar with Wordsworth's country, but, beyond that, we are under no such spell as Mr. Arnold confesses to above. We entertain profound veneration and homage for Wordsworth, but it is the result, not so much of early teaching--the most difficult of all lessons to unlearn--as of independent admiration and sympathy inspired in riper years. We, too, can read _Peter Bell_ and the _Ecclesiastical Sonnets_, but with more edification than pleasure; and we have read, afresh, every word of what Mr. Arnold has included in his _Poems of Wordsworth_, only to reach the conclusion we have already stated, that from many, only too many of them, the spirit, the essence, the indefinable something, of poetry is absent.

We should be sorry to be thought guilty of dogmatism, and there is always peril in generalisations. Let us therefore descend to particulars, as far as s.p.a.ce will permit, and a.n.a.lyse the contents of Mr. Arnold's _Poems of Wordsworth_. The volume consists of 317 pages; of which 20 are dedicated to "Poems of Ballad Form," 92 to "Narrative Poems," 56 to "Lyrical Poems,"

34 to "Poems akin to the Antique and Odes," 32 to "Sonnets," and 83 to "Reflective and Elegiac Poems."

In the first division, _We are Seven_, _Lucy Gray_, and _The Reverie of Poor Susan_, are the only poems that can be p.r.o.nounced wholly satisfactory, and that give real pleasure. _Anecdote for Fathers_ and _Alice Fell_ would be just as well away, for they would raise the reputation of no poet, save it be with those against whom "we must be on our guard." The poems, _The Childless Father_, _Power of Music_, and _Star-Gazers_, are redeemed only by their moral; and perhaps of _Power of Music_, even this cannot be said.

An Orpheus! an Orpheus!--yes, Faith may grow bold, And take to herself all the wonders of old;-- Near the stately Pantheon you'll meet with the same In the street that from Oxford hath borrowed its name.

His station is there;--and he works on the crowd, He sways them with harmony merry and loud; He fills with his power all their hearts to the brim-- Was aught ever heard like his Fiddle and him?

What an eager a.s.sembly! what an empire is this!

The weary have life, and the hungry have bliss; The mourner is cheered, and the anxious have rest; And the guilt-burthened soul is no longer opprest.

Then follow eight stanzas, in which the baker, the apprentice, the newsman, the lamplighter, the porter, the la.s.s with her barrow, the cripple, the mother, and others, are described as stopping to listen, in language similar to that of the three stanzas we have quoted; the only slight improvement upon it being such lines as "She sees the Musician, 'tis all that she sees," until we reach the conclusion:

Now, coaches and chariots! roar on like a stream; Here are twenty souls happy as souls in a dream: They are deaf to your murmurs, they care not for you, Nor what ye are flying, nor what ye pursue.

The more ardent admirers of Wordsworth are in the habit of a.s.suming that those persons who approach their favourite poet with a more hesitating homage, fail to appreciate the beauty of simplicity, and fancy that a composition is not poetical because it lacks what is called elevation of language and the "grand style." We can a.s.sure them, in all sincerity, that far from that being the basis of our inability to admire all that they admire, we admire Wordsworth most, and we admire him immensely, when he is as simple as it is possible to be. We have just cited a poem, which we scarcely think deserves that name. But, side by side with it, in Mr.

Arnold's volume, is a much shorter composition, on precisely the same theme, which is, if possible, still more simple in treatment, but which is true poetry, if true poetry was ever written. It is called _The Reverie of Poor Susan_:

At the corner of Wood Street, when daylight appears, Hangs a thrush that sings loud, it has sung for three years: Poor Susan has pa.s.sed by the spot, and has heard In the silence of morning the song of the Bird.

'Tis a note of enchantment; what ails her? She sees A mountain ascending, a vision of trees; Bright volumes of vapour through Lothbury glide, And a river flows on through the vale of Cheapside.

Green pastures she views in the midst of the dale, Down which she so often has tripped with her pail; And a single small cottage, a nest like a dove's, The one only dwelling on earth that she loves.

She looks, and her heart is in heaven; but they fade, The mist and the river, the hill and the shade: The stream will not flow, and the hill will not rise, And the colours have all pa.s.sed away from her eyes.

After reading _The Reverie of Poor Susan_, we may pay Wordsworth's Muse the compliment that was paid by the Latin poet to the woman who was _simplex munditiis_. Its neat simplicity is in great measure the secret of its success; but it is not mean in its simplicity. Neither, as in the other poems we have contrasted with it, have we to wait till the end of the poem for the moral and the meaning. The moral is interwoven and interfused with it, and every line breathes the soul and essence of the entire composition. But nearly all these "Poems of Ballad Form" are didactic; and does not Mr. Arnold tell us, in his preface, "Some kinds of poetry are in themselves lower kinds than others; the ballad kind is a lower kind; the didactic kind, still more, is a lower kind"? Of the twenty pages of these poems of lower kind, we are strongly disposed to think that the "disinterested lover of poetry" would discard twelve, and retain only eight, and that Wordsworth, to use Mr. Arnold's phrase, would "stand higher" if this were done.

But even this proportion between retention and rejection cannot well be maintained by the disinterested lover of poetry as he advances through the volume. The "Narrative Poems" occupy nearly a third of it, and in this section the amount of real poetry is meagre indeed. We had no conception how many short poems Wordsworth had written, unredeemed by "the gleam, the light that never was, on sea or land," till we read this collection consecutively; and we read it in the open air, in a beautiful country, on the loveliest day of a lovely May. But nothing could possibly attune the heart of the disinterested lover of poetry to such verses as these:

When Ruth was left half desolate, Her father took another mate; And Ruth, not seven years old, A slighted child, at her own will Went wandering over dale and hill, In thoughtless freedom, bold.

There came a Youth from Georgia's sh.o.r.e-- A military casque he wore, With splendid feathers drest; He brought them from the Cherokees; The feathers nodded in the breeze, And made a gallant crest.

"Belovd Ruth!" No more he said.

The wakeful Ruth at midnight shed A solitary tear: She thought again--and did agree With him to sail across the sea, And drive the flying deer.

"And now, as fitting is and right, We in the Church our faith will plight, A husband and a wife."

Even so they did; and I may say That to sweet Ruth that happy day Was more than human life.

Not only is it impossible, we think, for the disinterested lover of poetry to read this either with pleasure or with edification, but it is not easy for him to read it without an ever-broadening smile. As a rule, the verse to be met with in our less fastidious Magazines is not of a very high order. But we doubt if the editor of any one of them would consent to insert the foregoing stanzas, or those that follow, with their, "But as you have before been told," "Meanwhile, as thus with him it fared, They for the voyage were prepared," "G.o.d help thee, Ruth! Such pains she had, That she in half a year was mad," and such like specimens of unartistic and naive childishness. Surely, if there be any one who thinks this poetry, it must be Mr. Arnold's friend, the British Philistine? If Murdstone and Quinion could be converted and ever took to reading poetry, would not this be the sort of verse that would delight them? And would they not do so by reason of that "stunted sense of beauty," and that "defective type" of intellect with which Mr. Arnold justly reproaches the English middle-cla.s.s?

Did these poems stand alone, in their prosaic puerility, we might be surprised that Mr. Arnold had reproduced them; but we should have been content to conclude that, like Homer, both poet and editor had been nodding. But we turn page after page of these "Narrative Poems" to be astonished by what we encounter. The next poem to _Ruth_ is _Simon Lee: The Old Huntsman, with an Incident in which he was Concerned_:

Few months of life has he in store, As he to you will tell, For still, the more he works, the more Do his weak ankles swell.

My gentle Reader, I perceive How patiently you've waited, And now I fear that you'll expect Some tale will be related.

O Reader! had you in your mind Such stores as silent thought can bring, O gentle Reader! you would find A tale in everything.

What more I have to say is short, And you must kindly take it: It is no tale; but, should you _think_, Perhaps a tale you'll make it.

Simon is grubbing the stump of a tree, but was unequal to the task. The poet takes the mattock from his hand, and with a blow severs the root, "At which the poor Old Man so long, And vainly had endeavoured." Thankful tears come into his eyes, whereupon the poet remarks:

I've heard of hearts unkind, kind deeds With coldness still returning; Alas! the grat.i.tude of men Hath oftener left me mourning.

The sentiment is nice and pretty, but is it poetry, or, even if it were, could it make poetry of the doggerel--for surely there really is no other name for it--that precedes it? And do Wordsworthians against whom Mr.

Arnold tells us we ought to be on our guard, or Wordsworthians who fancy that we need not be on our guard against _them_, suppose that moralising correctly and piously in verse about every "incident" in which somebody happens to be "concerned," renders the narrative a "tale,"--much more, makes poetry of it? We are far from saying that Wordsworth might not, in a happier mood, have written poetry upon this particular incident. But we do say, with some confidence, that he has unfortunately not done so; that the incident, narrated in the manner in which he has narrated it, cannot of itself be accepted as poetry--which, as Mr. Arnold well knows, is the extreme Wordsworthian theory, as advocated by Wordsworth himself in pages upon pages of controversial prose; and that we are greatly astonished Mr.

Arnold should indirectly lend it countenance, by reprinting and stamping with his precious approval, such infelicitous triviality as the above. We cannot shrink from saying this, through an unworthy dread lest we should be confounded with "the tenth-rate critics and compilers to whom it is still permissible to speak of Wordsworth's poetry, not only with ignorance, but with impertinence." Mr. Arnold has himself shown that he does not hesitate to speak in pretty strong terms of those portions of Wordsworth's verse which he does not regard as poetry. He describes them as "abstract verbiage"; he acknowledges that they are so inferior, it seems wonderful how Wordsworth should have produced them; and in a pa.s.sage delightfully humorous he imagines a long pa.s.sage of Wordsworth being declaimed at a Social Science Congress to an admiring audience of men with bald heads and women in spectacles, "and in the soul of any poor child of nature who may have wandered in thither, an unutterable sense of lamentation, mourning, and woe."

All that we ask, therefore, is to be allowed the same amount of liberty which Mr. Arnold himself has exercised, and to be permitted to do what he has done. We, too, would fain disengage what is valuable in Wordsworth's poetry from what is worthless. We, too, would fain "exhibit his best work, and clear away obstructions from around it." But we contend, and we willingly leave the decision to disinterested lovers of poetry, that such poems as _Ruth_ and _Simon Lee_ are not only not Wordsworth's best work, but not good work at all; on the contrary are part of the obstruction from which it should be cleared.

The next two poems in the "Narrative" section refer to the fidelity of dogs, and a single stanza will suffice to show that they are of much the same calibre as the two that precede them:

But hear a wonder for whose sake This lamentable tale I tell!

A lasting monument of words This wonder merits well.

The Dog, which still was hovering nigh, Repeating the same timid cry, This Dog, had been through three months' s.p.a.ce A dweller in that savage place.

Next in order comes _Hart-Leap Well_, which consists of two parts. In the first we come across such lines and phrases as "Joy sparkled in the prancing courser's eyes," "A rout that made the echoes roar," "Soon did the Knight perform what he had said, And far and wide thereof the fame did ring," "But there is matter for a second rhyme, And I to this would add another tale," which are simply a distress to the disinterested reader of poetry. In the second part, the poet warms up, and ends with a pa.s.sage which is very beautiful:

Grey-headed Shepherd, thou hast spoken well; Small difference lies between thy creed and mine: This Beast not un.o.bserved by Nature fell; His death was mourned by sympathy divine.