base
With its seven proper colours chorded,
Which still, in the rising, were compressed,
Until at last they coalesced,
And supreme the spectral creature lorded
In a triumph of purest white,--
Above which intervened the night.
But above night too, like only the next,
The second of a wondrous sequence,
Reaching in rare and rarer frequence,
Till the heaven of heavens were circumflexed,
Another rainbow rose, a mightier,
Fainter, flushier, and flightier,--
Rapture dying along its verge.
Oh, whose foot shall I see emerge,
Whose, from the straining topmost dark,
On to the keystone of that arc?"

At moments of such energy and ecstasy as this, all that there is in the
poet of mere worldly wisdom and intellectual ingenuity drops off, or
rather is consumed to a white glow in the intense flame of triumphant
and over-mastering inspiration.

The piercing light cast in the poem on the representative creeds of the
age is well worthy of serious consideration, from an ethical as well as
from a poetical point of view. No nobler lesson of religious tolerance,
united with religious earnestness, has been preached in our day. Nothing
could be more novel and audacious than the union here attempted and
achieved of colloquial realism and grotesque humour with imaginative
vision and solemn earnestness. The style and metre vary with the mood.
Where the narrative is serious the lines are regular and careful, they
shrink to their smallest structural limit, and the rhymes are chiefly
single and simple. Where it becomes humorous, the rhythm lengthens out
its elastic syllables to the full extent, and swings and sways, jolts
and rushes; the rhymes fall double and triple and break out into audible
laughter.

_Easter-Day_, like its predecessor, is written in lines of four beats
each, but the general effect is totally dissimilar. Here the verse is
reduced to its barest constituents; every line is, syllabically as well
as accentually, of equal length; and the lines run in pairs, without one
double rhyme throughout. The tone and contents of the two poems (though
also, in a sense, derived from the same elements) are in singular
contrast. _Easter-Day_, despite a momentary touch or glimmer, here and
there, of grave humour, is thoroughly serious in manner and continuously
solemn in subject. The burden of the poem is stated in its first two
lines:--