while above all the others I prize the two lines—
"She from immortal patience hewed
The limbs of ever-young despair."
Yet while I thus distinguish, I reprove myself for separating them from the wave of five stanzas, of which they form the crest:
"Since first the chisel in her hand
Necessity, the sculptor, took,
And in her spacious meaning planned
These forms, and that eternal look;
These foreheads, moulded from afar,
These soft, unfathomable eyes,
Gazing from darkness, like a star;
These lips, whose grief is to be wise.
As from the mountain marble rude
The growing statue rises fair,
She from immortal patience hewed
The limbs of ever-young despair.
There is no bliss so new and dear,
It hath not them far-off allured,
All things that we have yet to fear
They have already long endured.
Nor is there any sorrow more
Than hath ere now befallen these,
Whose gaze is as an opening door
On wild interminable seas."
That I think is more successful poetry than any in Browning's Rabbi Ben Ezra or in Tennyson's Locksley Hall; nay, more successful than any produced by those great poets after the first glorious flush had paled on the forehead of their youthful genius. Is it not well described by Shelley's line—
