(Surely there is a pent-up beauty in these lines, and a veiled depth of feeling, exceedingly rare. But again:)
Great men reach dead hands unto me
From the graves to comfort me.[1]
Shakspeare's heart is throbbing thro' me.
All man has been man may be.
Plato speaks like one that knew me.
Life is made Philosophy.
Ah, no, no! while yet the leaf
Turns, the truths upon it pall.
By the stature of this grief,
Even Shakspeare shows so small!
Plato palters with relief.
Grief is greater than them all!
We have left ourselves no space to give entire any prominent specimen of Mr. Meredith's lyrical genius. But after so many shreds, scraps, and sundries, dislocated and dismembered at our own will and pleasure, it is due to him to give some one "copy of verses" unbroken and unmangled—and in giving the following, it is also due to him to add, that our choice of it has been controlled by the "law of limitation" in a periodical's letter-press. If little, it has, however, the merit of being (what Hamlet calls) a "picture in little:"
THE RUINED PALACE.Broken are the Palace windows:
Rotting is the Palace floor.
The damp wind lifts the arras.
And swings the creaking door;
But it only startles the white owl
From his perch on a monarch's throne,
And the rat that was gnawing the harp-strings
A Queen once played upon.
Dare you linger here at midnight
Alone, when the wind is about,
And the bat, and the newt, and the viper,
And the creeping things come out?
Beware of these ghostly chambers!
Search not what my heart hath been,
Lest you find a phantom sitting
Where once there sat a Queen.
- ↑ The repetition of this "me," with a difference in the accentuation, merely to accommodate the rhythm, not the sense, is a little awkward.
