Close following this is another
memorable passage, that beginning "Night, and one single ridge of narrow
path;" which has a particular interest for two notes of a deeper and
broader music to be evolved long afterwards. For, as it seems to me, in

"Thou art so close by me, the roughest swell
Of wind in the tree-tops hides not the panting
Of thy soft breasts -----"

(where, by the way, should be noticed the subtle correspondence between
the conceptive and the expressional rhythm) we have a hint of that
superb scene in "Pippa Passes," where, on a sinister night of July, a
night of spiritual storm as well as of aerial tempest, Ottima and Sebald
lie amid the lightning-searcht forest, with "the thunder like a whole
sea overhead." Again, in the lovely Turneresque, or rather Shelleyan
picture of morning, over "the rocks, and valleys, and old woods," with
the high boughs swinging in the wind above the sun-brightened mists, and
the golden-coloured spray of the cataract amid the broken rocks,
whereover the wild hawks fly to and fro, there is at least a suggestion,
an outline, of the truly magnificent burst of morning music in the
poet's penultimate volume, beginning--

"But morning's laugh sets all the crags alight
Above the baffled tempest: tree and tree
Stir themselves from the stupor of the night,
And every strangled branch resumes its right
To breathe, shakes loose dark's clinging dregs, waves free
In dripping glory. Prone the runnels plunge,
While earth, distent with moisture like a sponge,
Smokes up, and leaves each plant its gem to see,
Each grass-blade's glory-glitter," etc.

Who that has ever read "Pauline" will forget the masterful poetry
descriptive of the lover's wild-wood retreat, the exquisite lines
beginning "Walled in with a sloped mound of matted shrubs, tangled, old
and green"? There is indeed a new, an unmistakable voice here.

"And tongues of bank go shelving in the waters,
Where the pale-throated snake reclines his head,
And old grey stones lie making eddies there;
The wild mice cross them dry-shod"....

What lovelier image in modern poetry than that depictive of the
forest-pool in depths of savage woodlands, unvisited but by the shadows
of passing clouds,--

"the trees bend
O'er it as wild men watch a sleeping girl."

How the passionate sexual emotion, always deep and true in Br