Page:Men of Letters, Scott, 1916.djvu/299

THE FIRST MORRIS 273 There I plucked a faint wild There in my rest I plucked a rose, rose Hard by where the linden Where neath the lime a garden grows, blows Sighing over silver rows And winds run through the Of the lilies tall. trembling rows Of lilies slim and tall. I laid the flower across his I bore him water for his mouth ; drouth, The sparkling drops seem'd I laid the flower beside his good for drouth ; mouth, He smiled, turn'd round to- He smiled, turned round to- wards the south, wards the south. Held up a golden tress. Held up a golden tress. Is it not amazing? It would be difficult, with fewer strokes, to dispel the early fascination more com- pletely. Follow them. First come the melodic amend- ments — a general smoothing and tidying of the rhythm: a short line padded with an extra syllable (amid for m), a stiff line {Hard by where the linden grows) oiled and curved and given the conventional wave; the joints between syllable and syllable nicely softened and salved, until at length all the old numb naivete and ache of the accent has been quite worked away, and with it all sense of spiritual tension and distress. Next, neatly coincident, but carrying the work of suave destruction into still subtler crevices, come the soft changes in the scene. The erasure of faint and ivild instantly cools the light fever in the first effect; the new decorative slimness of the lilies makes them a mere ornament; and the introduction of the garden, the substitution of the benignant limes for the shuddering lindens, safely lowers the whole dream-landscape into something as contented and subdued as the orchard-close at Kelmscott. Remains now, of the first hectic picture, nothing but the queer morbid stain of the flower on the dead man's Men of Letters. 19