the next reading; you re-read, and wish them away, yet find
them, liked or disliked, so embedded in your memory that you cannot do
without them. Take, for instance, the last stanza of 'Phoebus with
Admetus':--

"'You with shelly horns, rams! and promontory goats,
You whose browsing beards dip in coldest dew!
Bulls that walk the pasture in kingly-flashing coats!
Laurel, ivy, vine, wreathed for feasts not few!
You that build the shade-roof, and you that court the rays,
You that leap besprinkling the rock stream-rent;
He has been our fellow, the morning of our days;
Us he chose for house-mates, and this way went.'

"The first thing that made this stanza unforgettable was the glorious
third line: almost as soon 'promontory goats' fastened itself on memory;
and almost as soon the last two lines were perceived to be excellent, and
the fourth also. These enforced you, for the pleasure of recalling them,
to recall the whole, and so of necessity to be hospitably minded toward
the fifth and sixth lines, which at first repelled as being too obscurely
and almost fantastically expressed. Having once passed it in, I find 'You
that leap besprinkling the rock stream-rent,' with its delicate labial
pause and its delicate consonantal chime, one of the most fascinating
lines in the stanza. And since, after being the hardest of all to admit,
it has become one of the best liked, I am forced in fairness to ask myself
if hundreds of lines of Mr. Meredith's which now seem crabbed or fantastic
may not justify themselves after many readings.

"The greatest mistake, at all events, is to suppose him ignorant or
careless of the persuasiveness which lies in technical skill; though we
can hardly be surprised that he has not escaped a charge which was freely
brought against Browning, than whom, perhaps, no single poet was ever more
untiring in technical experiment. Every poem of Browning's is an
experiment--sometimes successful, sometimes not--in wedding sense with
metre; and so is every poem of Mr. Meredith's (he has even attempted
galliambics), though he cannot emulate Browning's range. But he, too, has
had his amazing successes--in the long, swooping lines of 'Love in the
Valley':--

"'Shy as the squirrel and wayward as the swallow,
Swift as the swallow along the river's light,
Circleting the surface to meet his mirrored winglets,
Fleeter she seems in her stay t