the same soul for a woman's heart. All the foolish exaggeration, the sentimental pose, the confused mental endeavours of the one; all the 'hysterical mock-disease' of the other, the ghastly want of thought, the absurd misuse of the realities of life, will have disappeared, and the happy reader will thrill to the delicate melodies and the jewelled hues of the verse, marvels of sound and sight. Then he will understand what this man has really accomplished for the language in which he wrote—how all his endless patience wedded to his 'inmost horticultural art' strove to lift the level of our poetical achievement one plane higher, so that after him the loose and reckless syllabifications of a Byron and a Scott should seem impossible. He will know nothing of the finikin amateur, the half-hearted dilettante who again and again has irritated and disgusted his fathers. He will see this star, this little sparkling star, clear of all obscuring vapours, in its serene and appointed orbit.
Turning from the batch of delightful excerpts (another dozen can be found even in the 'Idylls of the King'), he will confront unbroken poems, such as 'The Lotus Eaters,' and 'A Dream of Fair Women,' happily overrating them as the first outcomes of the post-'Juvenilia' period. Thence a small gallery of lovely products will lead him to the lesser neo-Greek and neo-Roman masterpieces, and in 'The Princess'
