red coat and barks for joy--

and so forth. There you have clear and faithful observation, clearly and
faithfully reproduced. I do not want to depreciate the amount of
literary skill necessary for putting those right words in their right
places. Nevertheless I cannot bring myself to think it particularly
remarkable. The picture is distinct, but it is of the eye alone; it
involves nothing in the way of imagination, nothing in the way of subtle
feeling blending with the sight in the brain of the writer. Next take a
stanza from Matthew Arnold's _Thyrsis_:--

So, some tempestuous morn in early June,
When the year's primal burst of bloom is o'er,
Before the roses and the longest day--
When garden walks and all the grassy floor
With blossoms red and white of fallen May
And chestnut flowers are strewn--
So have I heard the cuckoo's parting cry,
From the wet field, through the vext garden trees,
Come with the volleying rain and tossing breeze:
"_The bloom is gone, and with the bloom go I._"

Now to me that passage expresses something immeasurably more difficult
of expression. The whole tone of the environment is reproduced in a few
touches. We not only realize the scene, but we also feel in its
description the same mood of subtle pensiveness, with its flavour of
melancholy, in which the writer saw and felt it. For myself I know that
the passage brings back to me, exactly and perfectly, not only a mental
picture, but also a frame of mind, which I can recognize across the
years which now separate me from those English "garden walks and all the
grassy floor" strewn with "blossoms red and white of fallen May and
chestnut flowers."

If you have never experienced precisely that frame of mind, you cannot,
of course, appreciate the literary power, any more than you can
appreciate Shelley's all-exquisite

The One remains, the many change and pass;
Heaven's light for ever shines, earth's shadows fly;
Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,
Stains the white radiance of eternity,
Until Death tramples it to fragments--

unless you have pondered the mystery of life and eternity somewhat as he
had done.

Yes! that must be premised all through. You must have had your own mood
of profound world-weariness, before you can appreciate the utter
completeness of the cry of Beatrice Cenci:--

"Sweet Heaven, forgive weak thoughts! If there should be
No God, no Heaven, no Earth in t