suit? "Every gentleman" he cried "is
my natural enemy!"

The feverish fanaticism of his devotion knew absolutely no limits.
His cry day and night was for "new sensations"; and such
"sensation," a mere epicurean indulgence to others, was a lust, a
madness, a frenzy, a fury, a rushing upon death, to him.

How young he was, how pitifully young, when the Foam-born,
jealous of him as she was jealous of Hippolytus, hurled him
bleeding to the ground!

But what Poetry he has left behind him! There is nothing like it in
the world. Nothing like it, for sheer, deadly, draining, maddening,
drowsing witchery of beauty. It is the very cup of Circe--the very
philtre of Sun-poison. "A thing of Beauty is a Joy forever"! A Joy?
Yes--but a Joy _drugged_ from its first pouring forth. We follow.
We have to follow. But, O the weariness of the way!

What an exultant hymn that is,--the one in honour of Pan, which
comes so soon in Endymion! The dim rich depths of the dark forests
are stirred by it, and its murmurs die away, over the wailing spaces
of the marshes. Obscure growths, and drowsy weeds overhanging
moon-lit paths, where fungoid things fumble for light and air, hear
that cry in their voluptuous dreams and move uneasily. The dumb
vegetable _expectancy_ of young tree-trunks is roused by it into
sensual terror. For this is the sound of the hoof of Pan, stamping on
the moist earth, as he rages for Syrinx. No one has ever understood
the torment of the Wood-god and his mad joy, as the author of
Endymion understood them. The tumultuous ground-swell of this
poet's insane craving for Beauty must in the end have driven him on
the rocks; but there came sometimes softer, gentler, less
"vermeil-tinctured" moods, which might have prolonged his days,
had he never met "that girl."

"The Pot of Basil" expresses one of these. Wistful and heart-breaking,
it has a tender yearning _pity_ in it, a gentle melancholy
brooding, over the irremediable pain of love-loss, which haunts one
like the sound of drowned Angelus-bells, under a hushed sea. The
description of the appearance of the ghost of the dead boy and his
vague troubled speech, is like nothing else that has ever been written.

St. Agnes Eve too, in its more elaborate, more premeditated art, has
a beauty so poignant, so _sensuously unearthly,_ that one dare not
quote a line of it, in a mere "critical essay," for fear of breaking such
a spell!

The long-drawn solemn harmonies of "Hyperion"--Mi