nd the laughter of children echoes from its roof. With the
exception of Isbrand, the characters of the play are pale and shadowy
enough, but the poetry that they speak is wonderful. The gloom and
tender beauty of the verse are inextricably united, as in the plays of
Webster, whose "intellectual twin" Beddoes might have been. Here is a
lovely sketch of "a melancholy lady:"

_Duke._ Thorwald, I fear hers is a broken heart.
When first I met her in the Egyptian prison,
She was the rosy morning of a woman:
Beauty was rising, but the starry grace
Of a calm childhood might be seen in her.
But since the death of Wolfram, who fell there,
Heaven and one single soul only know how,
I have not dared to look upon her sorrow.

_Thorwald._ Methinks she's too unearthly beautiful.
Old as I am, I cannot look at her,
And hear her voice, that touches the heart's core,
Without a dread that she will fade o' th' instant.
There's too much heaven in her; oft it rises,
And, pouring out about the lovely earth,
Almost dissolves it. She is tender too;
And melancholy is the sweet pale smile
With which she gently does reproach her fortune

But the greatest beauty of this singular poem, with its wild medley of
jesters and spirits, knights and fiends, Deaths and tender women, "like
flowers on a grave," is the wonderful perfection of its songs. There are
no less than thirteen in this play, some of them the wild mockery
remind us of their faults. A turgid inflation in the tragic passages, a
tendency to bombast, even more apparent in the man of forty-six than in
the boy of nineteen, mar the calm strength of many of his scenes. The
cloying sweetness that overloaded the verses of his juvenile work he
left behind him as he grew older, but the Marlowe-like extravagance that
noted in the soliloquies of _Hesperus_ still comes to the surface
occasionally in the pages of _Death's Jest-Book_. It is the extravagance
of strength, however, not of weakness.

It is not often that we see a poet giving up the glorious race from
sheer distrust of his power to win, but such was the case of Beddoes. A
want of faith in his own genius was for ever paralyzing his hand. To
succeed, as he himself knew but too well, and as he wrote to his editor,
"a man must have an exclusive passion for his art, and all the obstinacy
and self-denial which is combined with such a temperament--an
unconquerable and alway