thing:

But little he cared, that stripling pale,
For the sinking sun or the rising gale;
For he, as he rode, was dreaming now,
Poor youth, of a woman's broken vow,
Of the cup dashed down, ere the wine was tasted,
Of eloquent speeches sadly wasted,
Of a gallant heart all burnt to ashes,
And the Baron of Katzberg's long moustaches.

And these:

Swift as the rush of an eagle's wing,
Or the flight of a shaft from Tartar string,
Into the wood Sir Rudolph went:
Not with more joy the schoolboys run
To the gay green fields when their task is done;
Not with more haste the members fly,
When Hume has caught the Speaker's eye.

But in "The Red Fisherman" itself there is nothing that is not good. It
is very short, ten small pages only of some five-and-twenty lines each.
But there is not a weak place in it from the moment when "the Abbot
arose and closed his book" to the account of his lamentable and yet
lucky fate and punishment whereof "none but he and the fisherman could
tell the reason why." Neither of the two other practitioners who may be
called the masters of this style, Hood and Barham, nor Praed himself
elsewhere, nor any of his and their imitators has trodden the
breadthless line between real terror and mere burlesque with so steady a
foot.

Still not here was his "farthest," as the geographers say, nor in the
considerable mass of smaller poems which practically defy
classification. In them, as so often elsewhere in Praed, one comes
across odd notes, stray flashes of genius which he never seems to have
cared to combine or follow out, such as the unwontedly solemn "Time's
Song," the best wholly serious thing that he has done, and the charming
"L'Inconnue." But we find the perfect Praed, and we find him only, in
the verses of society proper, the second part of the "Poems of Life and
Manners" as they are headed, which began, as far as one can make out, to
be written about 1826, and the gift of which Praed never lost, though he
practised it little in the very last years of his life. Here, in a
hundred pages, with a few to be added from elsewhere, are to be found
some of the best-bred and best-natured verse within the English
language, some of the most original and remarkable metrical experiments,
a profusion of the liveliest fancy, a rush of the gayest rhyme. They
begin with "The Vicar," _vir nulla non donandus lauru_.

[Whose] talk was like a stream,