I, alas! embrace a shade.

Fainter glows each beauteous image,
Thy beauty vanishing before;
I will clasp thy lovely shadow,
Fate will grant to me no more.

If the verses were not very good, L'Isle was ready to acknowledge it;
but, in fact, he had not the fear of criticism before his eyes; for
when did lady ever criticise verses made in her praise? But he had
reckoned without his host. Though Lady Mabel recited them exceedingly
well, in a way that showed that she must have read them over many
times, and dwelt upon them, there was an under-current of ridicule
running through her tones and action--for she had personified the
river-god--and when she was done, she criticised them with merciless
irony.

"This is no timid rhymster," she exclaimed, "but a true poet of the
Spanish school: No figure is too bold for him. A mere versifier would
have likened a lady's eyes to earthly diamonds or heavenly stars; the
blessed sun itself is not too bright for our poet's purpose.--My timid
fancy dared not follow his soaring wing; to me at the first glance,
the 'stately Roman maid' was building her mimic Rome on the banks of
the Guadiana with solid stone and tough cement, and I saddened at the
sight of her labors. To come down to the mechanism of the verse," she
continued, "besides a false rhyme or two, the measure halts a
little.--But we must not forget that the river-god is taking a
poetical stroll in the shackles of a foreign tongue. In this case we
have good assurance that the poet has never been out of his own
country, and to the _eye_ of a foreigner 'flood' and 'wood' and 'home'