e of love, and rich with that
prodigality of beauty with which youthful genius loves to make itself
splendid. It begins with a scene in a garden, and "while that winged
song, the restless nightingale, turns her sad heart to music," two
lovers talk of flowers and love and dreams--dreams of the Queen of
Smiles, and her attendant mob of Loves, busy with their various tasks:

Here stood one alone,
Blowing a pyre of blazing lovers' hearts
With bellows full of absence-caused sighs:
Near him his work-mate mended broken vows
With dangerous gold, or strung soft rhymes together
Upon a lady's tress.... And one there was alone,
Who with wet downcast eyelids threw aside
The remnants of a broken heart, and looked
Into my face and bid me 'ware of love,
Of fickleness, and woe, and mad despair.

There are beautiful scenes and passages all through the play, the
passion and the terror smacking somewhat of youth, perhaps, that loves
to pile up agonies, but the poetry still so fine that one continually
forgets to say, This is the work of a boy of nineteen. There is no need
to say it, in fact: it is a work of genius, and demands no extenuation.
There is a scene between Olivia and her attendants, as they prepare her
for her bridal, that has a sustained and tender sweetness and calm about
it hard to be matched in all our modern drama. For the same Olivia is
sung this lovely

SONG, BY TWO VOICES.

_First Voice._ Who is the baby that doth lie
Beneath the silken canopy
Of thy blue eye?

_Second Voice._ It is young Sorrow laid asleep
In the crystal deep.

_Both._ Let us sing his lullaby,
Heigho! a sob and a sigh.

_First Voice._ What sound is that, so soft, so clear,
Harmonious as a bubbled tear
Bursting, we hear?

_Second Voice._ It is young Sorrow, slumber breaking,
Suddenly waking.

_Both._ Let us sing his lullaby,
Heigho! a sob and a sigh.

They are not all dirges, these beautiful scraps of melody. Sometimes we
come upon one as blithe as sunshine, like this serenade from the fine
fragment called _The Second Brother_:

Strike, you myrtle-crowned boys,
Ivied maidens, strike together:
Magic lutes are these whose noise
Our fingers gather,
Threaded thrice with golden strings
From Cupid's bow:
And the sounds of its sweet voice
Not air, but little busy things,
Pinioned with the