because of their art.
Sir James Stephen was only telling the truth when he remarked that
Milton might have put all that he had to say in _Paradise Lost_ into a
prose pamphlet of two or three pages. But who cares about what Milton
had to say? It is his way of saying it that matters; it is his
expression. Take away the expression from the _Satires_ of Pope, or from
_The Excursion_, and, though you will destroy the poems, you will leave
behind a great mass of thought. Take away the expression from
_Hyperion_, and you will leave nothing at all. To ask which is the
better of the two styles is like asking whether a peach is better than a
rose, because, both being beautiful, you can eat the one and not the
other. At any rate, Beddoes is among the roses: it is in his expression
that his greatness lies. His verse is an instrument of many modulations,
of exquisite delicacy, of strange suggestiveness, of amazing power.
Playing on it, he can give utterance to the subtlest visions, such as
this:

Just now a beam of joy hung on his eyelash;
But, as I looked, it sunk into his eye,
Like a bruised worm writhing its form of rings
Into a darkening hole.

Or to the most marvellous of vague and vast conceptions, such as this:

I begin to hear
Strange but sweet sounds, and the loud rocky dashing
Of waves, where time into Eternity
Falls over ruined worlds.

Or he can evoke sensations of pure loveliness, such as these:

So fair a creature! of such charms compact
As nature stints elsewhere: which you may find
Under the tender eyelid of a serpent,
Or in the gurge of a kiss-coloured rose,
By drops and sparks: but when she moves, you see,
Like water from a crystal overfilled,
Fresh beauty tremble out of her and lave
Her fair sides to the ground.

Or he can put into a single line all the long memories of adoration:

My love was much;
My life but an inhabitant of his.

Or he can pass in a moment from tiny sweetness to colossal turmoil:

I should not say
How thou art like the daisy in Noah's meadow,
On which the foremost drop of rain fell warm
And soft at evening: so the little flower
Wrapped up its leaves, and shut the treacherous water
Close to the golden welcome of its breast,
Delighting in the touch of that which led
The shower of oceans, in whose billowy drops
Tritons and lions of the sea were warring,