untains,
a painting which caught his eye years later in Paris; and the figure of
a horse in the tapestry in his own drawing-room."[32] The poem depicts
the last adventure of a knight vowed to the quest of a certain "Dark
Tower." The description of his journey across a strange and dreadful
country is one of the ghastliest and most vivid in all poetry; ghastly
without hope, without alleviation, without a momentary touch of
contrast; vivid and ghastly as the lines following:--

"A sudden little river crossed my path
As unexpected as a serpent comes.
No sluggish tide congenial to the glooms;
This, as it frothed by, might have been a bath
For the fiend's glowing hoof--to see the wrath
Of its black eddy bespate with flakes and spumes.

So petty yet so spiteful! All along,
Low scrubby alders kneeled down over it;
Drenched willows flung them headlong in a fit
Of mute despair, a suicidal throng:
The river which had done them all the wrong,
Whate'er that was rolled by, deterred no whit.

Which while I forded,--good saints, how I feared
To set my foot upon a dead man's cheek,
Each step, or feel the spear I thrust to seek
For hollows, tangled in his hair or beard!
--It may have been a water-rat I speared
But, ugh! it sounded like a baby's shriek."

The manner of the poem, wholly unlike that of any other poem, may be
described by varying Flaubert's phrase of "epic realism": it is romantic
realism. The weird, fantastic and profoundly imaginative picture brought
before us with such startling and almost oppressive vividness, is not
painted in a style of vague suggestiveness, but in a hard, distinct,
definite, realistic way, the realism which results from a faithful
record of distorted impressions. The poet's imagination is like a flash
of lightning which strikes through the darkness, flickering above the
earth, and lighting up, point by point, with a momentary and fearful
distinctness, the horrors of the landscape.

A large and important group of _Men and Women_ consists of love-poems,
or poems dealing, generally in some concrete and dramatic way, sometimes
in a purely lyrical manner, with the emotion of love. _Love among the
Ruins_, a masterpiece of an absolutely original kind, is the idyl of a
lover's meeting, in which the emotion is emphasised and developed by the
contrast of its surroundings. The lo