leave the windy vagaries of mental indigestion and come to the real
things--Life and Love.

_The River_ does not name any one, though the "arch eyes"
identify Marguerite; and _Excuse_, _Indifference_, and _Too
Late_ are obviously of the company. But none of these is exactly of
the first class. We grow warmer with _On the Rhine_, containing,
among other things, the good distich--

"Eyes too expressive to lie blue,
Too lovely to be grey";

on which Mr Swinburne gave a probably unconscious _scholion_ as
well as variation in his own--

"Those eyes, the greenest of things blue,
The bluest of things grey."

The intense pathos, which the poet could rarely "let himself go"
sufficiently to reach, together with the seventeenth-century touch
which in English not unfrequently rewards the self-sacrifice necessary
to scholarly poets in such abandonment, appears in _Longing_;
_The Lake_ takes up the faint thread of story gracefully enough;
and _Parting_ does the same with more importance in a combination,
sometimes very effective, of iambic couplets and anapaestic strophes,
and with a touch of direct if not exalted nature in its revelation of
that terrible thing, retrospective jealousy, in the lover. Woe to the
man who allows himself to think--

"To the lips! ah! of others