e any one, though the "arch eyes"
identify Marguerite; and _Excuse_, _Indifference_, and _Too
Late_ are obviously of the company. But none of these is exactly of
the first class. We grow warmer with _On the Rhine_, containing,
among other things, the good distich--

"Eyes too expressive to lie blue,
Too lovely to be grey";

on which Mr Swinburne gave a probably unconscious _scholion_ as
well as variation in his own--

"Those eyes, the greenest of things blue,
The bluest of things grey."

The intense pathos, which the poet could rarely "let himself go"
sufficiently to reach, together with the seventeenth-century touch
which in English not unfrequently rewards the self-sacrifice necessary
to scholarly poets in such abandonment, appears in _Longing_;
_The Lake_ takes up the faint thread of story gracefully enough;
and _Parting_ does the same with more importance in a combination,
sometimes very effective, of iambic couplets and anapaestic strophes,
and with a touch of direct if not exalted nature in its revelation of
that terrible thing, retrospective jealousy, in the lover. Woe to the
man who allows himself to think--

"To the lips! ah! of others
Those lips have been pressed,
And others, ere I was,
Were clasped to that breast,"

and who does not at once exorcise the demon with the fortunately
all-potent spell of _Bocca bacciata_, and the rest! _Absence_ and
_Destiny_ show him in the same Purgatory; and it is impossible to say
that he has actually escaped in the crowning poem of the series--the
crowning-point perhaps of his poetry, the piece beginning

"Yes! in the sea of life enisled."

It is neither uninteresting nor unimportant that this exquisite piece,
by a man's admiration of which (for there are some not wholly lost,
who do _not_ admire it) his soundness in the Catholic Faith of
poetry may be tested, perhaps as well as by any other, has borne more
than one or two titles, It is in the 1852 volume, _To Marguerite. In
returning a volume of the letters of Ortis_. In 1853 it became
_Isolation_, its best name; and later it took the much less
satisfactory one of _To Marguerite--continued_, being annexed to
another.

_Isolation_ is preferable for many reasons; not least because the
actual Marguerite appears nowhere in the poem, and, except in the
opening monosyllable, can hardly be said to be even rhetorically
addressed. The poet's affection--it is scarcely passion--is there, but
in tra