the first three lines, and its close in the fourth:
Apes and ivory, skulls and roses, in junks of old Hong Kong,
Gliding over a sea of dreams to a haunted shore of song;
Masts of gold and sails of satin, shimmering out of the east,
Oh, Love has little need of you now to make his heart a feast.
Beauty, fancy, the poetical imagination, seemed, I take it, to one as a boy to be something remote, and the general feeling sustained the belief. A very striking example was the approving misconception, almost universal, I think, in the last century, of Wordsworth’s great lines:
The light that never was on sea or land;
The consecration and the poet’s dream.
The whole moral of this poem is indeed very much to my point.
In the middle nineteenth century we had with us the relics of romance — for example, the sentimental German ballads, really a weak imitation of our own genuine ballads
