r the _one only_.

And what he says of himself, he in some degree thinks of her. The moon,
he reminds her, presents always the same surface to the world: whether
new-born, waxing, or waning; whether, as they late saw her, radiant
above the hills of Florence; or, as she now appears to them, palely
hurrying to her death over London house-tops. But for the "moonstruck
mortal" she holds another side, glorious or terrible as the case may
be--unknown alike to herdsman and huntsman, philosopher and poet, among
the rest of mankind. So she, who is his moon of poets, has also her
world's side, which he can see and praise with the rest;

"But the best is when I glide from out them,
Cross a step or two of dubious twilight,
Come out on the other side, the novel
Silent silver lights and darks undreamed of,
Where I hush and bless myself with silence." (vol. iv. p. 305.)

"PROSPICE" (look forward) is a challenge to spiritual conflict, exultant
with the certainty of victory, glowing with the prospective joy of
re-union with one whom death has sent before. We cannot doubt that this
poem, like the preceding, came from the depths of the poet's own heart.

"NUMPHOLEPTOS" (caught by a nymph) is passionately earnest in tone, and
must rank as lyrical in spite of the dramatic, at least fantastic,
circumstance in which the feeling is clothed. It is the almost
despairing cry of a human love, devoted to a being of superhuman purity;
and who does not reject the love, but accepts it on an impossible
condition: that the lover shall complete himself as a man by acquiring
the fullest knowledge of life, and shall emerge unsullied from its
experiences. This woman, more or less than mortal, belongs rather to the
"fairyland of science" than to the realm of mythology. She stands, in
passionless repose, at the starting-point of the various paths of
earthly existence. These radiate from her, many-hued with passion and
adventure, as light rays scattered by a prism; and, in the mocking hopes
with which she invests their course, she seems herself the cold white
light, of which their glow is born, and into which it will also die. She
bids her worshipper travel down each red and yellow ray, bathe in its
hues, and return to her "jewelled," but not smirched; and each time he
returns, not jewelled, but smirched; always to appear monstrous in her
sight; always to be dismissed with the same sad smile: so pitying that
it promis