iridescence of standing pools; the fungoidal growths of
decay; such are some of the hackneyed metaphors which render the
impression of this neo-romantic poetry.

Marzials was born at, Brussels, of French parents. His "Gallery of
Pigeons" is inscribed to the modern Provencal poet Aubanel, and
introduced by a French sonnet. O'Shaughnessy "was half a Frenchman in
his love for, and mastery of, the French language";[49] and on his
frequent visits to Paris, made close acquaintance with Victor Hugo and
the younger school of French poets. O'Shaughnessy and Payne were
intimate friends, and dedicated their first books to each other. In
1870-72 they were members of the literary circle that assembled at the
house of Ford Madox Brown, and there they met the Rossettis, Morris,
Swinburne, and William Bell Scott. O'Shaughnessy emerges most distinctly
from the group by reason of his very original and exquisite lyrical
gift--a gift not fully recognised till Mr. Palgrave accorded him, in the
second series of his "Golden Treasury" (1897), a greater number of
selections than any Victorian poet but Tennyson: a larger space than he
gave either to Browning or Rossetti or Matthew Arnold.[50] Comparatively
little of O'Shaughnessy's work belongs to the department of
mediaeval-romantic. His "Lays of France," five in number, are founded
upon the _lais_ of Marie de France, the Norman poetess of the thirteenth
century whose little fable, "Du coq et du werpil," Chaucer expanded into
his "Nonne Prestes Tale." O'Shaughnessy's versions are not so much
paraphrases as independent poems, following Marie's stories merely in
outline.

The verse is the eight-syllabled couplet with variations and alternate
riming, the style follows the graceful, fluent simplicity of the Old
French; and in its softly articulated, bright-coloured prolixity, the
narrative frequently suggests "The Earthly Paradise" or "The Story of
Rimini." The most remarkable of these pieces is "Chaitivel," in which
the body of a bride is carried away by a dead lover, while another dead
lover comes back from his grave in Palestine and fights with the
bridegroom for possession of her soul. The song which the lady sings to
the buried man is true to that strange mediaeval materialism, the
cleaving of "soul's love" to "body's love," the tenderness intense that
pierces the "wormy circumstance" of the tomb, and refuses to let the dead
be dead, which was noted in Keats' "Isabella":

"Hath