The famous poets sung and gone,"

and so on for nearly half a score of lines! How perfect the sad
contrast of the refrain--

"_Ah! so the quiet was!
So was the hush!_"

how justly set and felicitously worded the rural picture of the
opening! how riotous the famous irruption of the New Agers! how
adequate the quiet-moral of the end, that the Past is as the Present,
and more also! And then he went and wrote about Bottles!

"Progress," with a splendid opening--

"The master stood upon the mount and taught--
He saw a fire in his disciples' eyes,"--

conducts us to two other fine, though rhymeless, dirges. In the first,
_Rugby Chapel_, the intensity of feeling is sufficient to carry off
the lack of lyrical accomplishment. The other is the still better
_Heine's Grave_, and contains the famous and slightly pusillanimous
lines about the "weary Titan," which are among the best known of their
author's, and form at once the motto and the stigma of mid-century
Liberal policy. And then the book is concluded by two other
elegies--in rhyme this time--_The Stanzas written at the Grande
Chartreuse_ and _Obermann once more_. They are, however, elegies of a
different kind, much more self-centred, and, indeed, little more than
fresh variations on "the note," as I ventured to call it before. Their
descriptive and autobiographic interest is great, and if poetry were a