is:

_With half a moon, and clouds rose-pink,
And water-lilies just in bud,
With iris on the river-brink,
And white weed-garlands on the mud,
And roses thin and pale as dreams,
And happy cygnets born in May,
No wonder if our country seems
Drest out for Freedom's natal day_.

Or these:

_Peace lit upon a fluttering vein,
And self-forgetting on the brain;
On rifts by passion wrought again
Splashed from the sky of childhood rain,
And rid of afterthought were we
And from foreboding sweetly free.

Now falls the apple, bleeds the vine,
And, moved by some autumnal sign,
I who in spring was glad repine
And ache without my anodyne;
Oh! things that were! Oh! things that are!
Oh! setting of my double star!_

But these are rare, and the old unique _Ionica_ of thirty years
earlier is not repeated.

THE SHAVING OF SHAGPAT

THE SHAVING OF SHAGPAT. _An Arabian Entertainment. By George Meredith.
Chapman and Hall_. 1856.

It is nearly forty years since I first heard of _The Shaving of
Shagpat_. I was newly come, in all my callow ardour, into the covenant
of Art and Letters, and I was moving about, still bewildered, in a
new world. In this new world, one afternoon, Dante Gabriel Rossetti,
standing in front of his easel, remarked to all present whom it should
concern, that _The Shaving of Shagpat_ was a book which Shakespeare
might have been glad to write. I now understand that in the warm
Rossetti-language this did not mean that there was anything specially
reminiscent of the Bard of Avon in this book, but simply that it was
a monstrous fine production, and worthy of all attention. But at the
time I expected, from such a title, something in the way of a belated
_Midsummer Night's Dream_ or _Love's Labour's Lost_. I was fully
persuaded that it must be a comedy, and as the book even then was
rare, and as I was long pursuing the loan of it, I got this dramatic
notion upon my mind, and to this day do still clumsily connect it with
the idea of Shakespeare. But in truth _The Shaving of Shagpat_ has no
other analogy with those plays, which Bacon would have written if he
had been so plaguily occupied, than that it is excellent in quality
and of the finest literary flavour.

The ordinary small collection of rarities has no room for three-volume
novels, those signs-manual of our British dulness and crafty disdain
for literature. One or two of these _simulacra_, thes