Where barking waves still bait the forced ground;
Building their watery Babel far more high
To reach the sea than those to scale the sky!

It is done with a jolly wit, and in what admirable couplets!

The fish oft-times the burgher dispossessed,
And sat, not as a meat, but as a guest.

And it is even better sport that the astonished tritons and sea-nymphs
should find themselves provided with a capital _cabillau_ of shoals of
pickled Dutchmen (heeren for herring, says Marvell); and it must be
allowed that he rhymes with the enjoyment of irony. There is not a smile
for us in "Flecno," but it is more than possible to smile over this
"Character of Holland"; at the excluded ocean returning to play at leap-
frog over the steeples; at the rise of government and authority in
Holland, which belonged of right to the man who could best invent a
shovel or a pump, the country being so leaky:-

Not who first sees the rising sun commands,
But who could first discern the rising lands.

We have lost something more than the delighted laughter of Marvell, more
than his practical joke, and more than the heart that was light in so
burly a frame--we have lost with these the wild humour that wore so well
the bonds of two equal lines, and was wild with so much order, invention,
malice, gaiety, polish, equilibrium, and vitality--in a word, the
Couplet, the couplet of the past. We who cannot stand firm within two
lines, but must slip beyond and between the boundaries, who tolerate the
couplets of Keats and imitate them, should praise the day of Charles II