d to the edge of sunset, with their infinity of calm, are
contrasted with the vast and magnificent animation of the city which
once occupied the plain and the mountain slopes. The lover keeps at
arm's-length from his heart and brain what yet fills them all the while;
here in this placid pasture-land is one vivid point of intensest life;
here where once were the grandeur and tumult of the enormous city is
that which in a moment can abolish for the lover all its glories and its
shames. His eager anticipation of meeting his beloved, face to face and
heart to heart, is not sung, after the manner of Burns, as a jet of
unmingled joy; he delays his rapture to make its arrival more entirely
rapturous; he uses his imagination to check and to enhance his passion;
and the poem, though not a simple cry of the heart, is entirely true as
a rendering of emotion which has taken imagination into its service. In
like manner _By the Fireside, A Serenade at the Villa_, and _Two in the
Campagna_, include certain studies of nature and its moods, sometimes
with a curiously minute observation of details; and these serve as the
overture to some intense moment of joy or pain, or form the
orchestration which sustains or reinforces a human voice.

Of the pieces relating to art those connected with the art of poetry are
the least valuable. _Transcendentalism_ sets forth the old doctrine that
poetry must be sensuous and passionate, leaving it to philosophy to
deal with the naked abstractions of the intellect. _How it strikes a
Contemporary_ shows by a humorous example how a poet's character and
private life may be misconceived and misrepresented by those among whom
he moves. _Popularity_ maintains that the poet who is in the highest
sense original, an inventor of new things, may be wholly disregarded for
long, while his followers and imitators secure both the porridge and the
praise; one day God's hand, which holds him, will open and let out all
the beauty. The thought is an obvious one enough, but the image of the
fisher and the murex, in which the thought is embodied, affords
opportunity for stanzas glowing with colour. Two poems, and each of them
a remarkable poem, are interpretations of music. One, _Master Hugues of
Saxe-Gotha_, is a singularly successful _tour de force_, if it is no
more. Poetry inspired by music is almost invariably the rendering of a
sentiment or a mood which the music is supposed to express; but here, in
dealing with the fugu