Part Three Poet and Angel Chapter 39 By The Rhine

in which the word "wondering" paints a whole landscape of dreamy enchantment, and the couplet in the "Ode to a Nightingale," that speaks with a delicious vagueness of "Magic casements opening on the foam Of perilous seas in faery lands forlorn,"-are absolutely unique and unrivalled, as is the exquisite alliteration taken from a poet of our own day: "The holy lark, With fire from heaven and sunlight on his wing, Who wakes the world with witcheries of the dark, Renewed in rapture in the reddening air!"

Again from the same: "The chords of the lute are entranced With the weight of the wonder of things"; and "his skyward notes Have drenched the summer with the dews of song! ..."

this last line being certainly one of the most suggestive and beautiful in all poetical literature. Such expressions have the intrinsic quality of COMPLETENESS,--once said, we feel that they can never be said again;--they belong to the centuries, rather than the seasons, and any imitation of them we immediately and instinctively resent as an outrage.

And Theos Alwyn was essentially, and above all things, faithful to the lofty purpose of his calling,--he dealt with his art reverently, and not in rough haste and scrambling carelessness,-- if he worked out any idea in rhyme, the idea was distinct and the rhyme was perfect,--he was not content, like Browning, to jumble together such hideous and ludicrous combinations as "high;-- Humph!" and "triumph,"--moreover, he knew that what he had to tell his public must be told comprehensively, yet grandly, with all the authority and persuasiveness of incisive rhetoric, yet also with all the sweetness and fascination of a passioned love-song. Occupied with such work as this, London, with its myriad mad noises and vulgar distractions, became impossible to him,--and Villiers, his fidus Achates, who had read portions of his great poem and was impatient to see it finished, knowing, as he did, what an enormous sensation it would create when published, warmly seconded his own desire to gain a couple of months complete seclusion and tranquillity.