from home."--p. 25.

The Reveller, going to join the train of Bacchus in his temple, has
strayed into the house of Circe and has drunk of her cup: he believes
that, while poets can see and know only through participation in
endurance, he shares the power belonging to the gods of seeing
"without pain, without labour;" and has looked over the valley all
day long at the Moenads and Fauns, and Bacchus, "sometimes, for a
moment, passing through the dark stems." Apart from the inherent
defects of the metre, there is great beauty of pictorial description
in some passages of the poem, from which the following (where he is
speaking of the gods) may be taken as a specimen:--

"They see the Indian
Drifting, knife in hand,
His frail boat moored to
A floating isle, thick-matted
With large-leaved low-creeping melon plants,
And the dark cucumber.
He reaps and stows them,
Drifting--drifting:--round him,
Round his green harvest-plot,
Flow the cool lake-waves:
The mountains ring them."--p. 20.

From "the Sick King in Bokhara," we have already quoted at some
length. It is one of the most considerable, and perhaps, as being the
most simple and life-like, the best of the narrative poems. A vizier
is receiving the dues from the cloth merchants, when he is summoned
to the presence of the king, who is ill at ease, by Hussein: "a
teller of sweet tales." Arrived, Hussein is desired to relate the
cause of the king's sickness; and he tells how, three days since, a
certain Moollah came before the king's path, calling for justice on
himself, whom, deemed a fool or a drunkard, the guards pricked off
with their spears, while the king passed on into the mosque: and how
the man came on the morrow with yesterday's blood-spots on him, and
cried out for right. What follows is told with great singleness and
truth: "Thou knowest," the man says,

"'How fierce
In these last day the sun hath burned;
That the green water in the tanks
Is to a putrid puddle turned;
And the canal that from the stream
Of Samarcand is brought this way
Wastes and runs thinner every day.
"'Now I at nightfall had gone forth
Alone; and, in a darksome place
Under some mulberry-trees, I found
A little pool; and, in brief space,
With all the water that was there
I filled my pitcher, and stole home
Unseen; and, having drink to spare,
I hid the can behind the door