r. It is a ruinous process--for the poet. "He so well repays
intelligent study." That is it, unfortunately. There are many, like the
old Scotch lady who attempted to read Carlyle's _French Revolution_,
who think they have become "daft" when they encounter a passage such as,
for example,

"Rivals, who ...
Tuned, from Bocafoli's stark-naked psalms,
To Plara's sonnets spoilt by toying with,
'As knops that stud some almug to the pith
'Pricked for gum, wry thence, and crinkled worse
'Than pursed eyelids of a river-horse
'Sunning himself o' the slime when whirrs the breeze--
_Gad-fly,_ that is."

The old lady persevered with Carlyle, and, after a few days, found "she
was nae sae daft, but that she had tackled a varra dee-fee-cult author."
What would even that indomitable student have said to the above
quotation, and to the poem whence it comes? To many it is not the
poetry, but the difficulties, that are the attraction. They rejoice,
after long and frequent dippings, to find their plummet, almost lost in
remote depths, touch bottom. Enough 'meaning' has been educed from
'Childe Roland,' to cite but one instance, to start a School of
Philosophy with: though it so happens that the poem is an imaginative
fantasy, written in one day. Worse still, it was not inspired by the
mystery of existence, but by 'a red horse with a glaring eye standing
behind a dun one on a piece of tapestry that used to hang in the poet's
drawing-room.'[28] Of all his faults, however, the worst is that
jugglery, that inferior legerdemain, with the elements of the beautiful
in verse: most obvious in "Sordello," in portions of "The Ring and the
Book," and in so many of the later poems. These inexcusable violations
are like the larvae within certain vegetable growths: soon or late they
will destroy their environment before they perish themselves. Though
possessive above all others of that science of the percipient in the
allied arts of painting and music, wherein he found the unconventional
Shelley so missuaded by convention, he seemed ever more alert to the
substance than to the manner of poetry. In a letter of Mrs. Browning's
she alludes to a friend's "melodious feeling" for poetry. Possibly the
phrase was accidental, but it is significant. To inhale the vital air of
poetry we must love it, not merely find it "interesting," "suggestive,"
"soothing," "stimulative": in a word, we must