other quality of mind or emotion; and a song, for him, was music first, and
then whatever you please afterwards, so long as it suggested, never told,
some delicate sentiment, a sigh or a caress; finding words, at times, as
perfect as the words of a poem headed, "O Mors! quam amara est memoria tua
homini pacem habenti in substantiis suis."

There, surely, the music of silence speaks, if it has ever spoken. The
words seem to tremble back into the silence which their whisper has
interrupted, but not before they have created for us a mood, such a mood
as the Venetian Pastoral of Giorgione renders in painting. Languid, half
inarticulate, coming from the heart of a drowsy sorrow very conscious
of itself, and not less sorrowful because it sees its own face looking
mournfully back out of the water, the song seems to have been made by some
fastidious amateur of grief, and it has all the sighs and tremors of the
mood, wrought into a faultless strain of music. Stepping out of a paradise
in which pain becomes so lovely, he can see the beauty which is the other
side of madness, and, in a sonnet, "To One in Bedlam," can create a more
positive, a more poignant mood, with fine subtlety.

Here, in the moment's intensity of this comradeship with madness, observe
how beautiful the whole thing becomes; how instinctively the imagination
of the poet turns what is sordid into a radiance, all stars and flowers
and the divine part of forgetfulness! It is a symbol of the two sides of
his own life: the side open to the street, and the side turned away from
it, where he could "hush and bless himself with silence." No one ever
worshipped beauty more devoutly, and just as we see him here transfiguring
a dreadful thing with beauty, so we shall see, everywhere in his work, that
he never admitted an emotion which he could not so transfigure. He knew his
limits only too well; he knew that the deeper and graver things of life
were for the most part outside the circle of his magic; he passed them by,