hievements, if there were more frequent and more prolonged
insistence on the note struck in the lines (Sec. lxxiii.) about the
hill-stream, infant of mist and dew, falling over the ledge of the
fissured cliff to find its fate in smoke below, as it disappears into
the deep, "embittered evermore, to make the sea one drop more big
thereby:" or in the cloudy splendour of the description of nightfall (Sec.
cvi.): or in the windy spring freshness of

"Hence, when the earth began afresh its life in May,
And fruit-trees bloomed, and waves would wanton, and the bay
Ruffle its wealth of weed, and stranger-birds arrive,
And beasts take each a mate." ...

But its chief fault seems to me to be its lack of that transmutive glow
of rhythmic emotion without which no poem can endure. This rhythmic
energy is, inherently, a distinct thing from intellectual emotion.
Metric music may be alien to the adequate expression of the latter,
whereas rhythmic emotion can have no other appropriate issue. Of course,
in a sense, all creative art is rhythmic in kind: but here I am speaking
only of that creative energy which evolves the germinal idea through the
medium of language. The energy of the intellect under creative stimulus
may produce lordly issues in prose: but poetry of a high intellectual
order can be the outcome only of an intellect fused to white heat, of
intellectual emotion on fire--as, in the fine saying of George Meredith,
passion is noble strength on fire. Innumerable examples could be taken
from any part of the poem, but as it would not be just to select the
most obviously defective passages, here are two which are certainly
fairly representative of the general level--

"And I became aware, scarcely the word escaped my lips, that swift
ensued in silence and by stealth, and yet with certitude, a
formidable change of the amphitheatre which held the Carnival;
_although the human stir continued just the same amid that shift
of scene_." (No. CV.)

"And where i' the world is all this wonder, you detail so
trippingly, espied? My mirror would reflect a tall, thin, pale,
deep-eyed personage, pretty once, it may be, doubtless still
loving--certain grace yet lingers if you will--but all this
wonder, where?" (No. XL.)

Here, and in a hundred other such passages, we have the rhythm, if not
of the best prose, at least not that of poetry. Will "Fifine" and poems