rilling summons to his will,
Yet could not shake it;
Drained all the life his full heart had to spill;
Yet could not break it:"--

he records the "intolerable change of thought" with which it now
comes to his "long-sobered heart." Perhaps "The Forsaken Merman"
should be added to these; but the grief here is more nearly
approaching to gloomy submission and the sickness of hope deferred.

The lessons that the author would learn of nature are, as set forth
in the sonnet that opens the volume,

"Of toil unsevered from tranquillity;
Of labor that in one short hour outgrows
Man's noisy schemes,--accomplished in repose,
Too great for haste, too high for rivalry."--p. 1.

His conception of the poet is of one who

"Sees before him life unroll,
A placid and continuous whole;
That general life which does not cease;
Whose secret is, not joy, but peace;
That life, whose dumb wish is not missed
If birth proceeds, if things subsist;
The life of plants and stones and rain;
The life he craves:--if not in vain
Fate gave, what chance shall not control,
His sad lucidity of soul."--pp. 123-4.

(_Resignation._)

Such is the author's purpose in these poems. He recognises in each
thing a part of the whole: and the poet must know even as he sees, or
breathes, as by a spontaneous, half-passive exercise of a faculty: he
must receive rather than seek.

"Action and suffering tho' he know,
He hath not lived, if he lives so."

Connected with this view of life as "a placid and continuous whole,"
is the principle which will be found here manifested in different
modes, and thro' different phases of event, of the permanence and
changelessness of natural laws, and of the large necessity wherewith
they compel life and man. This is the thought which animates the
"Fragment of an 'Antigone:'" "The World and the Quietest" has no
other scope than this:--

"Critias, long since, I know,
(For fate decreed it so),
Long since the world hath set its heart to live.
Long since, with credulous zeal,
It turns life's mighty wheel:
Still doth for laborers send;
Who still their labor give.
And still expects an end."--p. 109.

This principle is brought a step futher into the relations of life in
"The Sick King in Bokhara," the following passage from which claims
to be quoted, not less for its vividness as description, than in
illustration of t