om that
of 'Parching summer hath no warrant'? Is it more profane, think you--or
more tender--nay, perhaps, in the core of it, more true?

For instance, when we are told that

'Wharfe, as he moved along,
To matins joined a mournful voice,'

is this disposition of the river's mind to pensive psalmody quite
logically accounted for by the previous statement (itself by no means
rhythmically dulcet,) that

'The boy is in the arms of Wharfe,
And strangled by a merciless force'?

Or, when we are led into the improving reflection,

'How sweet were leisure, could it yield no more
Then 'mid this wave-washed churchyard to recline,
From pastoral graves extracting thoughts divine!'

--is the divinity of the extract assured to us by its being made at
leisure, and in a reclining attitude--as compared with the meditations
of otherwise active men, in an erect one? Or are we perchance, many of
us, still erring somewhat in our notions alike of Divinity and
Humanity,--poetical extraction, and moral position?

On the chance of its being so, might I ask hearing for just a few words
more of the school of Belial?

Their occasion, it must be confessed, is a quite unjustifiable one. Some
very wicked people--mutineers, in fact--have retired, misanthropically,
into an unfrequented part of the country, and there find themselves
safe, indeed, but extremely thirsty. Whereupon Byron thus gives them to
drink:

'A little stream came tumbling from the height
And straggling into ocean as it might.
Its bounding crystal frolicked in the ray
And gushed from cliff to crag with saltless spray,
Close on the wild wide ocean,--yet as pure
And fresh as Innocence; and more secure.
Its silver torrent glittered o'er the deep
As the shy chamois' eye o'erlooks the steep,
While, far below, the vast and sullen swell
Of ocean's Alpine azure rose and fell.'[189]

Now, I beg, with such authority as an old workman may take concerning
his trade, having also looked at a waterfall or two in my time, and not
unfrequently at a wave, to assure the reader that here _is_ entirely
first-rate literary work. Though Lucifer himself had written it, the
thing is itself good, and not only so, but unsurpassably good, the
closing line being probably the best concerning the sea yet written by
the race of the sea-kings.

But Lucifer himself _could_ not have written it; neither any servant of
Lucife