poetical inventions. The friend has gone, and the brooding memory, in a sort of dream, mingles the true nature of the friend with all sorts of possibilities, fancies—the play of the mind, which seems arbitrary and casual in this poem, being really an accompaniment of the main thought, which is of Waring and his genius. The passage that brings out the music is where Iphigenia comes to the poet's mind. He is thinking of Russia—Russia makes him think of the Crimea, the Tauric Chersonese—then of Iphigenia in Tauris—and the verse changes from its loose variety into the sounding 'square' verse—the old heroic measure—:
Or who in Moscow, toward the Czar,
With the demurest of footfalls
Over the Kremlin's pavement, bright
With serpentine and syenite,
Steps with five other Generals
That simultaneously take snuff,
For each to have pretext enough,
And kerchief-wise unfold his sash,
Which, softness' self, is yet the stuff
To hold fast when a steel chain snaps,
And leave the grand white neck no gash.
Waring in Moscow, to those rough
Cold northern natures borne perhaps,
Like the lamb-white maiden dear
From the circle of mute kings
Unable to repress the tear,
Each as his sceptre down he flings,
To Dian's fane at Taurica,
Where now a captive priestess, she alway
Mingles her tender grave Hellenic speech
With theirs, tuned to the hailstone-beaten beach,
As pours some pigeon, from the myrrhy lands
Rapt by the whirlblast to fierce Scythian strands
Where breed the swallows, her melodious cry
Amid their barbarous twitter.
It would be pleasant to go on, to quote from Rudel, to repeat again the songs In a Gondola:
Which were best, to roam or rest,
The land's lap, or the water's breast
