ng sea-bird, bright and beautiful thou art

. . .

"But when the brow is blighted, like a star at morning tide
And faded is the crimson blush upon the cheek beside,
It is to love as seldom love the brightest and the best,
When our love lies like a dew upon the one that is at rest."

We ought to distrust our own admiration of what is rare, odd, novel to
us, found by us in a sense, and especially one must distrust one's liking
for the verses of a Tweedside angler, of a poet whose forebears lie in
the green kirkyard of Yarrow. But, allowing for all this, I cannot but
think these very musical, accomplished, and, in their place, appropriate
verses, to have been written by a boy of twenty. Nor is it a common
imagination, though busy in this vulgar field of horrors, that lifts the
pallid bride to look upon the mirror of the sea--

"And bids her gaze into the startled sea,
And says, 'Thine image, from eternity,
Hath come to meet thee, ladye!' and anon
He bade the cold corse kiss the shadowy one
That shook amid the waters."

The picture of the madness of thirst, allied to the disease of the brain,
is extremely powerful, the delirious monk tells the salt sea waves

"That ye have power, and passion, and a sound
As of the flying of an angel round
The mighty world; that ye are one with time!"

Here, I can't but think, is imagination.

Mr. Aytoun, however, noted none of those passages, nor that where, in
tempest and thunder, a shipwrecked sailor swims to the strange boat, sees
the Living Love and the Dead, and falls back into the trough of the wave.
But even the friendly pencil of Bon Gaultier approves the passage where
an isle rises above the sea, and the boat is lightly stranded on the
shore of pure and silver shells. The horrors of corruption, in the Third
Chimera, may be left unquoted, Aytoun parodies--

"The chalk, the chalk, the cheese, the cheese, the cheeses,
And straightway dropped he down upon his kneeses."

Julio comes back to reason, hates the dreadful bride, and feeds on
limpets, "by the mass, he feasteth well!"

There was a holy hermit on the isle,

"I ween like other hermits, so was he."

He is Agathe's father, and he has retired to an eligible island where he
may repent his cruelty to his daughter. Julio tells his tale, and goes
mad again. The apostrophe to Lunacy which follows is marked "Beautiful"
by Aytoun, and is in the spirit of Charles Lamb's