ffence, my disgrace?
I would we were boys as of old
In the field, by the fold:
His outrage, God's patience, man's scorn,
Were so easily borne!
I stand here now, he lies in his place:
Cover the face!"

I know of no piece of verse in the language which has more of the
quality and hush of awe in it than this little fragment of eighteen
lines.

_Instans Tyrannus_[34] (the Threatening Tyrant) recalls by its motive,
however unlike it may be as a poem, the _Soliloquy of the Spanish
Cloister_. The situations are widely different, but the root of each is
identical. In both is developed the mood of passive or active hate,
arising from mere instinctive dislike. But while in the earlier poem the
theme is treated with boisterous sardonic humour, it is here embodied in
the grave figure of a stern, single-minded, relentless hater, a tyrant
in both senses of the term. Another poem, representing an act of will,
though here it is love, not hate, that impels, is _Mesmerism_. The
intense absorption, the breathless eagerness of the mesmerist, are
rendered in a really marvellous way by the breathless and yet measured
race of the verses: fifteen stanzas succeed one another without a single
full-stop, or a real pause in sense or sound. The beautiful and
significant little poem called _The Patriot: an old Story_, is a
narrative and parable at once, and only too credible and convincing as
each. _Respectability_ holds in its three stanzas all that is vital and
enviable in the real "Bohemia," and is the first of several poems of
escape, which culminate in _Fifine at the Fair_. Both here and in
another short suggestive poem, _A Light Woman_ (which might be called
the fourth act of a tragedy), the situation is outlined like a
silhouette. Equally graphic, in the more ordinary sense of the term, is
the picturesque and whimsical view of town and country life taken by a
frivolous Italian person of quality in the poem named _Up at a
Villa--Down in the City_, "a masterpiece of irony and of description,"
as an Italian critic has defined it.

Of the wealth of lyrics and short poems no adequate count can here be
made. Yet, I cannot pass without a word, if only in a word may I
indicate, the admirable craftsmanship and playful dexterity of the lines
on _A Pretty Woman_; the pathetic feeling and the exquisite and novel
music of _Love in a Life and Life in a Love_; the tense emotion, the
suppressed and hopeful pass