refined, heightened, and inwoven
into the structure of the play. Those, in whom what Rousseau calls
les frayeurs nocturnes are constitutional, know what splendour they
give to the things of the morning; and how there comes something of
relief from physical pain with the first white film in the sky. The
Middle Age knew those terrors in all their forms; and these songs of
the morning win hence a strange tenderness and effect. The crown of
the English poet's book is one of these appreciations of the dawn:--

"Pray but one prayer for me 'twixt thy closed lips,
Think but one thought of me up in the stars,
The summer-night waneth, the morning light slips,
Faint and gray 'twixt the leaves of the aspen,
betwixt the cloud-bars,
That are patiently waiting there for the dawn:
Patient and colourless, though Heaven's gold
Waits to float through them along with the sun.
Far out in the meadows, above the young corn,
The heavy elms wait, and restless and cold
The uneasy wind rises; the roses are dun;
Through the long twilight they pray for the dawn,
Round the lone house in the midst of the corn.
Speak but one word to me over the corn,
Over the tender, bow'd locks of the corn."

It is the very soul of the bridegroom which goes forth to the bride:
inanimate things are longing with him: all the sweetness of the
imaginative loves [221] of the Middle Age, with a superadded
spirituality of touch all its own, is in that!

The Defence of Guenevere was published in 1858; the Life and Death of
Jason in 1867; to be followed by The Earthly Paradise; and the change
of manner wrought in the interval, entire, almost a revolt, is
characteristic of the aesthetic poetry. Here there is no delirium or
illusion, no experiences of mere soul while the body and the bodily
senses sleep, or wake with convulsed intensity at the prompting of
imaginative love; but rather the great primary passions under broad
daylight as of the pagan Veronese. This simplification interests us,
not merely for the sake of an individual poet--full of charm as he
is--but chiefly because it explains through him a transition which,
under many forms, is one law of the life of the human spirit, and of
which what we call the Renaissance is only a supreme instance. Just
so the monk in his cloister, through the "open vision," open only to
the spirit, divined, aspired to, and