INTRODUCTION
secret. The brief stroke does this work time and time again in his verse, nowhere better than in "at dead Youth's funeral:" all were there,—
The poem is like a vision of an old time Masque:—
"The sweet lad Rhyme"—
"Ardour, the sunlight on his greying hair"—
Beauty . . . pale in her black; dry-eyed, she stood alone."
How vivid! The lines owe something to his eye for costume, for staging; but, as mere picture writing, it is as firm as if carved on an obelisk. And as he reconciled concrete and abstract here, so he had left his short breath, in those earlier lines, behind, and had come into the long sweep and open water of great style:—
"And light on waving grass, he knows not when,
And feet that ran, but where, he cannot tell."
Or;—
"And feel, who have laid our groping hands away;
And see, no longer blinded by our eyes,"
Or, more briefly,—
And this,—
Such lines as these, apart from their beauty, are in the best manner of English poetic style. So, in many minor ways, he shuffled contrast and climax, and the like, adept in the handling of poetic rhetoric that he had come to be; but in three ways he was conspicuously successful in his art.
xi
