into the structure of the play. Those, in whom what Rousseau calls
les frayeurs nocturnes are constitutional, know what splendour they
give to the things of the morning; and how there comes something of
relief from physical pain with the first white film in the sky. The
Middle Age knew those terrors in all their forms; and these songs of
the morning win hence a strange tenderness and effect. The crown of
the English poet's book is one of these appreciations of the dawn:--

"Pray but one prayer for me 'twixt thy closed lips,
Think but one thought of me up in the stars,
The summer-night waneth, the morning light slips,
Faint and gray 'twixt the leaves of the aspen,
betwixt the cloud-bars,
That are patiently waiting there for the dawn:
Patient and colourless, though Heaven's gold
Waits to float through them along with the sun.
Far out in the meadows, above the young corn,
The heavy elms wait, and restless and cold
The uneasy wind rises; the roses are dun;
Through the long twilight they pray for the dawn,
Round the lone house in the midst of the corn.
Speak but one word to me over the corn,
Over the tender, bow'd locks of the corn."

It is the very soul of the bridegroom which goes forth to the bride:
inanimate things are longing with him: all the sweetness of the
imaginative loves [221] of the Middle Age, with a superadded
spirituality of touch all its own, is in that!

The Defence of Guenevere was published in 1858; the Life and Death of