And sometimes ships on fire sunk in the blood,
Of their own inmates; others were of ice,
And some had islands rooted in their waves,
Beasts on their rocks, and forest-powdering winds,
And showers tumbling on their tumbling self,
And every sea of every ruined star
Was but a drop in the world-melting flood.

He can express alike the beautiful tenderness of love, and the hectic,
dizzy, and appalling frenzy of extreme rage:--

... What shall I do? I speak all wrong,
And lose a soul-full of delicious thought
By talking. Hush! Let's drink each other up
By silent eyes. Who lives, but thou and I,
My heavenly wife?...
I'll watch thee thus, till I can tell a second
By thy cheek's change.

In that, one can almost feel the kisses; and, in this, one can almost
hear the gnashing of the teeth. 'Never!' exclaims the duke to his son
Torrismond:

There lies no grain of sand between
My loved and my detested! Wing thee hence,
Or thou dost stand to-morrow on a cobweb
Spun o'er the well of clotted Acheron,
Whose hydrophobic entrails stream with fire!
And may this intervening earth be snow,
And my step burn like the mid coal of Aetna,
Plunging me, through it all, into the core,
Where in their graves the dead are shut like seeds,
If I do not--O, but he is my son!

Is not that tremendous? But, to find Beddoes in his most characteristic
mood, one must watch him weaving his mysterious imagination upon the
woof of mortality. One must wander with him through the pages of
_Death's Jest Book_, one must grow accustomed to the dissolution of
reality, and the opening of the nettled lips of graves; one must learn
that 'the dead are most and merriest,' one must ask--'Are the ghosts
eaves-dropping?'--one must realise that 'murder is full of holes.' Among
the ruins of his Gothic cathedral, on whose cloister walls the Dance of
Death is painted, one may speculate at ease over the fragility of
existence, and, within the sound of that dark ocean,

Whose tumultuous waves
Are heaped, contending ghosts,

one may understand how it is that

Death is mightier, stronger, and more faithful
To man than Life.

Lingering there, one may watch the Deaths come down from their cloister,
and dance and sing amid the moonlight; one may laugh over the grotesque
contortions of skeletons; one may crack jokes upon corruption; one may
sit down with