Page:Men of Letters, Scott, 1916.djvu/310

284 THE FIRST MORRIS the frescoes from the walls of Tennyson's "Palace of Art " and used them as real places and people ; but the moral strains to which the Palace uprose, the polite debates about the infinities conducted inside it, all drained, not undesirably, away. The description did not even need to be direct. It might be merely the remote end of a metaphor : he could still snap it neatly off, lop it free from its stem, leaving nothing of the thought or emotion that gave birth to it except the ineradicable physical stains on its texture. He saw similes as solid things ; and such a casual touch as this, a side-glance through the shuttered lines of one of Rossetti's thickening dramas — But else, 'twas at the dead of noon, Absolute silence ; all, From the raised bridge and guarded sconce To green-clad places of pleasaunce Where the long lake was white with swans — provides him with a place he can enter and explore and afterwards patiently plan out for us (with an effect how different!) in such a careful inventory as this : — Midways of a walled garden, In the happy poplar land, Did an ancient castle stand, With an old knight for a warden. Across the moat the fresh west wind In very little ripples went ; The way the heavy aspens bent Towards it, was a thing to mind. The painted drawbridge over it Went up and down with gilded chains. 'Twas pleasant in the summer rains Within the bridge-house there to sit.