ild and
wondrous song which none that hears it can resist, and none that has
heard it may forget. Then did he learn the old monster's secret--the
word of his charm, the core of his mystery, the human note in his music,
the quality of his influence upon the heart and the mind of man; and then
did he win himself a place apart among sea poets. With the most of them
it is a case of _Ego et rex meus_: It is I and the sea, and my egoism is
as valiant and as vocal as the other's. But Longfellow is the spokesman
of a confraternity; what thrills him to utterance is the spirit of that
strange and beautiful freemasonry established as long ago as when the
first sailor steered the first keel out into the unknown, irresistible
water-world, and so established the foundations of the eternal
brotherhood of man with ocean. To him the sea is a place of mariners and
ships. In his verse the rigging creaks, the white sail fills and
crackles, there are blown smells of pine and hemp and tar; you catch the
home wind on your cheeks; and old shipmen, their eyeballs white in their
bronzed faces, with silver rings and gaudy handkerchiefs, come in and
tell you moving stories of the immemorial, incommunicable deep. He
abides in a port; he goes down to the docks, and loiters among the
galiots and brigantines, he hears the melancholy song of the chanty-men;
he sees the chips flying under the shipwright's adze; he smells the pitch
that smokes and bubbles in the caldron. And straightway he falls to
singing his variations on the ballad of Count Arnaldos; and the world
listens, for its heart beats in his song.

TENNYSON

St. Agnes' Eve.

In Keats's _St. Agnes' Eve_ nothing is white but the heroine. It is
winter, and 'bitter chill'; the hare 'limps trembling through the frozen
grass; the owl is a-cold for all his feathers; the beadsman's fingers are
numb, his breath is frosted; and at an instant of special and peculiar
romance

'The frost-wind blows
Like Love's alarum, pattering the sharp sleet
Against the window-panes.'

But there is no snow. The picture is pure colour: it blushes with blood
of queens and kings; it glows with 'splendid dyes,' like the
'tiger-moth's deep-damasked wings'--with 'rose bloom,' and warm gules,'
and 'soft amethyst'; it is loud with music and luxurious with 'spiced
dainties,' with lucent syrops tinct with cinnamon,' with 'manna and
dates,' the fruitage of Fez and 'cedared Lebanon' and 'silk