contains so much poor stuff. It is by such felicities as the climax—
"O so white! O so soft! O so sweet is she!"—
that the form of every lyric should be a discovery.
The surprise of this kind that seems to have fallen most directly out of heaven is the line—
"Sad true lover never find my grave"—
from the dirge in Twelfth Night.
"Come away, come away, death,
And in sad cypress let me be laid.
Fly away, fly away, breath;
I am slain by a fair cruel maid.
My shroud of white, stuck all with yew,
Oh, prepare it!
My part of death, no one so true
Did share it.
Not a flower, not a flower sweet,
On my black coffin let there be strown;
Not a friend, not a friend greet
My poor corpse, where my bones shall be thrown:
A thousand thousand sighs to save
Lay me, Oh, where
Sad true lover never find my grave
To weep there!"
The difficulty of accounting for the scansion of that disquieted Shakespearean editors for upwards of two hundred years, till at last it was observed that the irregularity was exceedingly beautiful. So easily is the goal of æsthetic research obscured even for men as intelligent as Pope or Capel.
Now, for fear of enervating our taste by an over-constant effort to appreciate what is perfect, let us compare a stanza from the great lyric in Matthew Arnold's Empedocles, and one from Browning's much-vaunted Rabbi Ben Ezra, with one from Shelley's To a Skylark.
