The side-lights from the binnacle;
He looketh on the wild water," &c.;
and so on, till the English speech seems the speech of raving madmen. Of a piece with other affectations is the device of a burden, of which the fleshly persons are very fond for its own sake, quite apart from its relevancy. Thus Mr. Rossetti sings:—
Sister Helen?
To-day is the third since you began.
The time was long, yet the time ran,
Little brother.
(O mother, Mary mother,
Three days to-day between Heaven and Hell.)"
This burden is repeated, with little or no alteration, through thirty-four verses. About as much to the point is a burden of Mr. Swinburne's, something to the following effect:—
Small red leaves in the mill-water;
Fairer maidens were never born,
Apples of gold for the king's daughter."
Productions of this sort are "silly sooth" in good earnest, though they delight some newspaper critics of the day, and are copied by young gentlemen with animal faculties morbidly developed by too much tobacco and too little exercise. Such indulgence, however, would ruin the strongest poetical constitution; and it unfortunately happens that neither masters nor pupils were naturally very healthy. In such a poem as "Eden Bower" there is not one scrap of imagination, properly so called. It is a clever grotesque in the worst manner of Callot, unredeemed by a gleam of true poetry or humour. No good poet would have wrought
