It is with him a dramatic secret. The brief stroke does this work
time and time again in his verse, nowhere better than in
"at dead YOUTH's funeral:" all were there, --

"All, except only LOVE -- LOVE had died long ago."

The poem is like a vision of an old time MASQUE: --

"The sweet lad RHYME" ----
"ARDOUR, the sunlight on his greying hair" ----
"BEAUTY . . . pale in her black; dry-eyed, she stood alone."

How vivid! The lines owe something to his eye for costume, for staging;
but, as mere picture writing, it is as firm as if carved on an obelisk.
And as he reconciled concrete and abstract here, so he had left
his short breath, in those earlier lines, behind, and had come into
the long sweep and open water of great style: --

"And light on waving grass, he knows not when,
And feet that ran, but where, he cannot tell."

Or; --

"And feel, who have laid our groping hands away;
And see, no longer blinded by our eyes,"

Or, more briefly, --

"In wise majestic melancholy train."