| No guilty pang she knows, though many a dread |
| Hangs threatening o’er her in the conscious air, |
| And ’mid the beams from that bright casement shut, |
| A twinkling crown foreshows a near despair. |
The quaint conciseness of this last line pleases me.
He always speaks in marble words of Greece. But I must make no more quotations.
Some part of his poem on Shakspeare is no unfit prelude to a few remarks on his own late work. With such a sense of greatness none could wholly fail.
With meaning won from him for ever glows
Each air that England feels, and star it knows;
And gleams from spheres he first conjoined to earth
Are blent with rays of each new morning’s birth,
Amid the sights and tales of common things,
Leaf, flower, and bird, and wars, and deaths of kings,
Of shore, and sea, and nature’s daily round
Of life that tills, and tombs that load the ground,
His visions mingle, swell, command, pass by,
And haunt with living presence heart and eye,
And tones from him, by other bosoms caught,
Awaken flush and stir of mounting thought,
And the long sigh, and deep, impassioned thrill,
Rouse custom’s trance, and spur the faltering will.
Above the goodly land, more his than ours,
He sits supreme enthroned in skyey towers.
And sees the heroic blood of his creation
Teach larger life to his ennobled nation.
O! shaping brain! O! flashing fancy’s hues!
O! boundless heart kept fresh by pity’s dews!
O! wit humane and blythe! O! sense sublime
For each dim oracle of mantled Time!
Transcendant form of man! in whom we read,
Mankind’s whole tale of Impulse, Thought, and Deed.
Such is his ideal of the great dramatic poet. It would not be fair to measure him, or any man, by his own ideal; that affords a standard of spiritual and intellectual progress, with which the ex-
