I should not say
    How thou art like the daisy in Noah’s meadow,
    On which the foremost drop of rain fell warm
    And soft at evening:  so the little flower
    Wrapped up its leaves, and shut the treacherous water
    Close to the golden welcome of its breast,
    Delighting in the touch of that which led
    The shower of oceans, in whose billowy drops
    Tritons and lions of the sea were warring,
    And sometimes ships on fire sunk in the blood,
    Of their own inmates; others were of ice,
    And some had islands rooted in their waves,
    Beasts on their rocks, and forest-powdering winds,
    And showers tumbling on their tumbling self,
    And every sea of every ruined star
    Was but a drop in the world-melting flood.

He can express alike the beautiful tenderness of love, and the hectic, dizzy, and appalling frenzy of extreme rage:—­

...  What shall I do?  I speak all wrong, And lose a soul-full of delicious thought By talking.  Hush!  Let’s drink each other up By silent eyes.  Who lives, but thou and I, My heavenly wife?...  I’ll watch thee thus, till I can tell a second By thy cheek’s change.

In that, one can almost feel the kisses; and, in this, one can almost hear the gnashing of the teeth.  ‘Never!’ exclaims the duke to his son Torrismond: 

    There lies no grain of sand between
    My loved and my detested!  Wing thee hence,
    Or thou dost stand to-morrow on a cobweb
    Spun o’er the well of clotted Acheron,
    Whose hydrophobic entrails stream with fire! 
    And may this intervening earth be snow,
    And my step burn like the mid coal of Aetna,
    Plunging me, through it all, into the core,
    Where in their graves the dead are shut like seeds,
    If I do not—­O, but he is my son!

Is not that tremendous?  But, to find Beddoes in his most characteristic mood, one must watch him weaving his mysterious imagination upon the woof of mortality.  One must wander with him through the pages of Death’s Jest Book, one must grow accustomed to the dissolution of reality, and the opening of the nettled lips of graves; one must learn that ‘the dead are most and merriest,’ one must ask—­’Are the ghosts eaves-dropping?’—­one must realise that ‘murder is full of holes.’  Among the ruins of his Gothic cathedral, on whose cloister walls the Dance of Death is painted, one may speculate at ease over the fragility of existence, and, within the sound of that dark ocean,

          Whose tumultuous waves
    Are heaped, contending ghosts,

one may understand how it is that

    Death is mightier, stronger, and more faithful
    To man than Life.

Lingering there, one may watch the Deaths come down from their cloister, and dance and sing amid the moonlight; one may laugh over the grotesque contortions of skeletons; one may crack jokes upon corruption; one may sit down with phantoms, and drink to the health of Death.