d concords--soft enow
To hear the winecups passing through,
And not too grave to spoil the show.

"'Thou, certes, when thou askest more,
O sapient angel! leanest o'er
The window-sill of metaphor.

"'To give our hearts up! fie!--That rage
Barbaric, antedates the age!
It is not done on any stage.

"'Because your scald or gleeman went
With seven or nine-string'd instrument
Upon his back--must ours be bent?

"'We are not pilgrims, by your leave,
No, nor yet martyrs! if we grieve,
It is to rhyme to ... summer eve.

"'And if we labour, it shall be
As suiteth best with our degree,
In after-dinner reverie.'

"More yet that speaker would have said--
Poising between his smiles fair-fed,
Each separate phrase till finished:

"But all the foreheads of those born
And dead true poets flash'd with scorn
Betwixt the bay leaves round them worn--

"Ay, jetted such brave fire, that they,
The new-come, shrank and paled away,
Like leaden ashes when the day

"Strikes on the hearth! A spirit-blast,
A presence known by power, at last
Took them up mutely--they had pass'd!"

"Lady Geraldine's Courtship" is a poem of the Tennysonian school. Some
pith is put forth in the passionate parts of the poem; but it is
deficient throughout in that finished elegance of style which
distinguishes the works of the great artist from whom it is imitated.
Bertram, a peasant-born poet falls in love with the Lady Geraldine, a
woman of high rank and very extensive possessions. He happens to
overhear the lady address the following words to a suitor of the same
rank with herself, and whose overtures she is declining--

"Yes, your lordship judges rightly. Whom I marry, shall be noble,
Ay, and wealthy. I shall never blush to think how he was born."

Upon which, imagining that these words have some special and cutting
reference to himself, he passes into the presence of the lady, and rates
her in a strain of very fierce invective, which shows that his blood is
really up, whatever may be thought of the taste which dictated his
language, or of the title he had to take to task so severely a lady who
had never given him any sort of encouragement. In a letter to a friend,
he thus describes the way in which he went to work--the fourth line is a
powerful one--

"Oh, she flutter'd like a tame bird, in among its forest-brothers,