human life
Have moulded."

Such passages, though they add nothing to the verisimilitude of
Kathrina's character, help to make her appear consistent in not laughing
at a certain weird poem which her lover reads to her. Few ladies in real
life, however great a tenderness they might feel for a morbid young
poet, could practise Kathrina's self-control, when, depicting himself as
a godless youth imprisoned by phantoms "among the elves of the silent
land," he sings:

"Under the charred and ghastly gloom,
Over the flinty stones,
They led him forth to his terrible doom,
And, plunged in a deep and noisome tomb,
They sat him among the bones."

Where, crouching, he beholds, through a "loop" in the wall, "a sweet
angel from the skies":--

"Could she not loose him from his thrall,
And lead him into the light?
'Ah me!' he murmured, 'I dare not call,
Lest she may doubt it a goblin's waul,
And leave me in swift affright!'"

The question is of the poet himself, immersed in his own gloomy
thoughts, and of Kathrina, who could rescue him from them; but she has
heard "only a wild, weird story," and her lover is obliged to explain
it, and still we are to suppose that she did not laugh. Nay, we are told
that she instantly accepted the poet, who exclaims:

"Are there not lofty moments when the soul
Leaps to the front of being, casting off
The robes and clumsy instruments of sense,
And, postured in its immortality,
Reveals its independence of the clod
In which it dwells?--moments in which the earth
And all material things, all sights and sounds,
All signals, ministries, interpreters,
Relapse to nothing, and the interflow
Of thought and feeling, love and life, go on
Between two spirits, raised to sympathy
The body dust, within an orb outlined,
It shall go on forever?"

We have no reason to suppose that this is not thought a fine passage by
the author, who will doubtless find readers enough to agree with him, if
he should not care to accept our estimate of his whole poem.
Nevertheless, we must confess that it appears to us puerile in
conception, destitute of due motive, and crude and inartistic in
treatment. But we should be unjust both to ourselves and our author, if
we left his work without some allusion to its highly embellished style,
or, having failed to approve the whole design, refused to notice at all
the elaborate orna