A /C/alm earth-goddess /c/rowned with /c/orn and vines.

Then we have a really pretty but artificial line--an alliteration in
"m."

On the /M/id Sea that /m/oans with /m/e/m/ories.

The seventh line again is an alliteration of alternate "p" and "d."

/P/ant /d/umbly /p/assionate with /d/reams of youth.

The tenth line is an excruciating alliteration in sibilants.

/F/eed/s/ the /f/amed /s/tream that water/s/ Andalu/s/.

But it must be admitted that the next line is graceful--

And loiters, amorous of the fragrant air.

The whole introduction of some 400 lines is full of beautiful images,
fine thoughts, and striking phrases, but it is crowded, artificial,
brocaded to excess with _trop de choses_; and it suddenly breaks into
drama, with dialogue in person. This alternation of dramatic form and
dialogue with epical narrative, interlarding the tragedy in parts with
portentously long explanatory comment, is perhaps the most unlucky
novelty which was ever attempted in verse. What would one say if even
fine passages out of Wordsworth's _Excursion_ had been accidentally
bound up between the pages of Shakespeare's _Hamlet_?

But it is needless to enlarge on all the metrical and poetic defects of
this medley of nearly 10,000 lines, with its lip-twisting,
ear-torturing lyrics--(was there ever such a cacophony as--

O the sweet sweet prime
Of the past spring-time!)--

with its strange alternations of action and narration, its soliloquies
of 150 unbroken lines, and all its other incongruities. The important
point is, that it has a really grand scheme, that the characters of
Zarca and of Fedalma are lofty, impressive, and nobly dramatic, that
the whole poem is, in conception, a work of power and true imagination.
Just as Kingsley, who had far greater poetic faculty than George Eliot,
mistook in making the _Saint's Tragedy_ a drama, when he might have
made it a grand historical romance, so George Eliot made a cruel
mistake in writing the _Spanish Gypsy_ as a poem, when she might have
written it as an historical romance--a romance, it may be, much
superior to _Romola_, as the subject and the conception were on grander
lines.

It is to me a truly melancholy duty to have to admit that so much in
the noble conceptions and rich thought of George Eliot was not a
complete success in ultimate execution--and that, in great measure,
because the conception and aim were so great and the execution so
profoundly