Their smooth tops shining sunwards, and beneath
Burying their unsunned stems in grass and flowers;
Where in one dream the feverish time of youth
Might fade in slumber, and the feet of joy
Might wander all day long, and never tire:
Here came the king, holding high feast at morn,
Rose-crowned: and even when the sun went down,
A hundred lamps beamed in the tranquil gloom,
From tree to tree, all through the twinkling grove,
Revealing all the tumult of the feast,
Flushed guests, and golden goblets foamed with wine,
While the deep burnished foliage overhead
Splintered the silver arrows of the moon."

Containing as it did poems of merit so high as these,
it may seem strange that this volume should not have
received a more ready recognition; for there is no
excellence which the writer of the passages which we have
quoted could hereafter attain, the promise of which
would not be at once perceived in them. But the
public are apt to judge of books of poetry by the rule
of mechanism, and try them not by their strongest parts
but by their weakest; and in the present instance (to
mention nothing else) the stress of weight in the title
which was given to the collection was laid upon what
was by no means adequate to bearing it. Whatever be
the merits of the "Strayed Reveller" as poetry, it is
certainly not a poem in the sense which English people
generally attach to the word, looking as they do not
only for imaginative composition but for verse;--and