But the caprice of The Strayed Reveller does not cease with its rhymelessness.  The rhythm and the line-division are also studiously odd, unnatural, paradoxical.  Except for the “poetic diction” of putting “Goddess” after “Circe” instead of before it, the first stave is merely a prose sentence, of strictly prosaic though not inharmonious rhythm.  But in this stave there is no instance of the strangest peculiarity, and what seems to some the worst fault of the piece, the profusion of broken-up decasyllables, which sometimes suggest a very “corrupt” manuscript, or a passage of that singular stuff in the Caroline dramatists which is neither blank verse, nor any other, nor prose.  Here are a few out of many instances—­

      “Is it, then, evening
  So soon? [I see the night-dews
  Clustered in thick beads], dim,” etc.

       * * *
  ["When the white dawn first
  Through the rough fir-planks. ”]

       * * *
  ["Thanks, gracious One! 
  Ah! the sweet fumes again.”]

       * * *
  ["They see the Centaurs
  In the upper glens.”]

One could treble these—­indeed in one instance (the sketch of the Indian) the entire stanza of eleven lines, by the insertion of one “and” only, becomes a smooth blank-verse piece of seven, two of which are indeed hemistichs, and three “weak-ended,” but only such as are frequent in Shakespeare—­

  “They see the Indian drifting, knife in hand,
  His frail boat moored to a floating isle—­thick-matted
  With large-leaved [and] low-creeping melon-plants
  And the dark cucumber. 
  He reaps and stows them, drifting, drifting:  round him,
  Round his green harvest-plot, flow the cool lake-waves,
  The mountains ring them.”

Nor, perhaps, though the poem is a pretty one, will it stand criticism of a different kind much better.  Such mighty personages as Ulysses and Circe are scarcely wanted as mere bystanders and “supers” to an imaginative young gentleman who enumerates, somewhat promiscuously, a few of the possible visions of the Gods.  There is neither classical, nor romantic, nor logical justification for any such mild effect of the dread Wine of Circe:  and one is driven to the conclusion that the author chiefly wanted a frame, after his own fashion, for a set of disconnected vignettes like those of Tennyson’s Palace of Art and Dream of Fair Women.

But if the title poem is vulnerable, there is plenty of compensation.  The opening sonnet—­

  “Two lessons, Nature, let me learn of thee”—­