But now they have seen and hated.

Seen? and yet hated thee? They did not see—­ They saw thee not, that saw and hated thee!  No, no; they saw thee not, O Life!  O Love!  Who saw aught in thee that their hate could move.

We must not be too ready to quarrel with every oddity:  an oddity will sometimes just give the start to an outbreak of song.  The strangeness of the following hymn rises almost into grandeur.

  EASTER DAY.

  Rise, heir of fresh eternity,
      From thy virgin-tomb;
  Rise, mighty man of wonders, and thy world with thee;
    Thy tomb, the universal East—­
      Nature’s new womb;
  Thy tomb—­fair Immortality’s perfumed nest.

    Of all the glories[139] make noon gay
      This is the morn;
  This rock buds forth the fountain of the streams of day;
    In joy’s white annals lives this hour,
      When life was born,
  No cloud-scowl on his radiant lids, no tempest-lower.

      Life, by this light’s nativity,
        All creatures have;
  Death only by this day’s just doom is forced to die. 
    Nor is death forced; for, may he lie
      Throned in thy grave,
  Death will on this condition be content to die.

When we come, in the writings of one who has revealed masterdom, upon any passage that seems commonplace, or any figure that suggests nothing true, the part of wisdom is to brood over that point; for the probability is that the barrenness lies in us, two factors being necessary for the result of sight—­the thing to be seen and the eye to see it.  No doubt the expression may be inadequate, but if we can compensate the deficiency by adding more vision, so much the better for us.

In the second stanza there is a strange combination of images:  the rock buds; and buds a fountain; the fountain is light.  But the images are so much one at the root, that they slide gracefully into each other, and there is no confusion or incongruity:  the result is an inclined plane of development.

I now come to the most musical and most graceful, therefore most lyrical, of his poems.  I have left out just three stanzas, because of the sentimentalism of which I have spoken:  I would have left out more if I could have done so without spoiling the symmetry of the poem.  My reader must be friendly enough to one who is so friendly to him, to let his peculiarities pass unquestioned—­amongst the rest his conceits, as well as the trifling discord that the shepherds should be called, after the classical fashion—­ill agreeing, from its associations, with Christian song—­Tityrus and Thyrsis.

  A HYMN OF THE NATIVITY SUNG BY THE SHEPHERDS.

Chorus.  Come, we shepherds, whose blest sight Hath met love’s noon in nature’s night; Come, lift we up our loftier song, And wake the sun that lies too long.

  To all our world of well-stolen[140] joy
    He slept, and dreamed of no such thing,
  While we found out heaven’s fairer eye,
    And kissed the cradle of our king: 
  Tell him he rises now too late
  To show us aught worth looking at.