carolled their clear, pure lays to him, and left a quivering echo.  Fine, fleeting fantasies we have, a tender, heartfelt, heart-reaching pathos, laughter that might at any moment tremble into tears, eternal truths, draped in the garb of quaint and simple story, solemn fervors, subtile sympathies, and the winsomeness of little children at their play,—­sometimes glowing with the deepest color, often just tinged to the pale and changing hues of a dream, but touched with such coy grace, modulated to such free, wild rhythm, suffused with such a delicate, evanishing loveliness, that they seem scarcely to be the songs of our tangible earth, but snatches from fairy-land.  Often rude in form, often defective in rhyme, and not unfrequently with even graver faults than these, their ruggedness cannot hide the gleam of the sacred fire.  “The Spirit of the Age,” moulding her pliant poets, was wiser than to meddle with this sterner stuff.  From what hidden cave in Rare Ben Jonson’s realm did the boy bring such an opal as this

  SONG.

  “My silks and fine array,
    My smiles and languished air,
  By Love are driven away;
    And mournful, lean Despair
  Brings me yew to deck my grave: 
  Such end true lovers have!

  “His face is fair as heaven,
    Where springing buds unfold;
  Oh, why to him was ’t given,
    Whose heart is wintry cold? 
  His breast is Love’s all-worshipped tomb,
  Where all Love’s pilgrims come.

  “Bring me an axe and spade,
    Bring me a winding-sheet;
  When I my grave have made,
    Let winds and tempests beat: 
  Then down I’ll lie, as cold as clay. 
  True love doth pass away.”

What could the Spirit of the Age hope to do with a boy scarcely yet in his teens, who dared arraign her in such fashion as is set forth in his address

  TO THE MUSES.

  “Whether on Ida’s shady brow,
    Or in the chambers of the East,
  The chambers of the Sun, that now
    From ancient melody have ceased;

  “Whether in heaven ye wander fair,
    Or the green corners of the earth,
  Or the blue regions of the air,
    Where the melodious winds have birth;

  “Whether on crystal rocks ye rove
    Beneath the bosom of the sea,
  Wandering in many a coral grove,
    Fair Nine, forsaking Poetry;

  “How have you left the ancient love
    That bards of old enjoyed in you! 
  The languid strings do scarcely move,
    The sound is forced, the notes are few.”

Whereabouts in its Elegant Extracts would a generation that strung together sonorous couplets, and compiled them into a book to Enforce the Practice of Virtue, place such a ripple of verse as this?—­

  “Piping down the valleys wild,
    Piping songs of pleasant glee,
  On a cloud I saw a child,
    And he, laughing, said to me: 

  “‘Pipe a song about a lamb!’
    So I piped with merry cheer. 
  ‘Piper, pipe that song again!’
    So I piped; he wept to hear.