one crosses like these are
not unfamiliar to you, nor are these dim garlands of everlasting flowers.
Here is the place." "Then the watcher approaches the patient's pillow,
and sees a new and strange moulding of the familiar features, feels at
once that the insufferable moment draws nigh." In the same passage comes
another single word of genius, "the sound that so wastes our strength."
And, fine as "wastes," is the "wronged" of another sentence--"some
wronged and fettered wild beast or bird."

It is easy to gather such words, more difficult to separate the best from
such a mingled page as that on "Imagination": "A spirit, softer and
better than human reason, had descended with quiet flight to the waste";
and "My hunger has this good angel appeased with food sweet and strange";
and "This daughter of Heaven remembered me to-night; she saw me weep, and
she came with comfort; 'Sleep,' she said, 'sleep sweetly--I gild thy
dreams.'" "Was this feeling dead? I do not know, but it was buried.
Sometimes I thought the tomb unquiet."

Perhaps the most "eloquent" pages are unluckily those wherein we miss the
friction--friction of water to the oar, friction of air to the
pinion--friction that sensibly proves the use, the buoyancy, the act of
language. Sometimes an easy eloquence resembles the easy labours of the
daughters of Danaus. To draw water in a sieve is an easy art, rapid and
relaxed.

But no laxity is ever, I think, to be found in her brief passages of
landscape. "The keen, still cold of the morning was succeeded, later in
the day, by a sharp breathing from the Russian wastes; the cold zone
sighed over the temperate zone and froze it fast." "Not till the
destroying angel of tempest had achieved his perfect work would he fold
the wings whose waft was thunder, the tremor of whose plumes was storm."
"The night is not calm: the equinox still struggles in its storms. The
wild rains of the day are abated: the great single cloud disappears and
rolls away from Heaven, not passing and leaving a sea all sapphire, but
tossed buoyant before a continued, long-sounding, high-rushing moonlight
tempest. . . No Endymion will watch for his goddess to-night: there are
no flocks on the mountains." See, too, this ocean: "The sway of the
whole Great Deep above a herd of whales rushing through the livid and
liquid thunder down from the frozen zone." And this promise of the
visionary Shirley: "I am to be walking by myself on deck, rather