In this poem the story is conveyed by allusions and reminiscences whilst the Merman makes his children call after her who had returned to her own earth, hearing the Easter bells over the bay, and who is not yet come back for all the voices calling “Margaret!  Margaret!” The piece is scarcely long enough or sufficiently distinct otherwise than as a whole to allow of extract; but we cannot but express regret that a poem far from common-place either in ubject or treatment should conclude with such sing-song as

------“There dwells a loved one,
But cruel is she;
She left lonely for ever
The kings of the sea.”

“The Strayed Reveller” is written without rhyme—­(not being blank verse, however,)—­and not unfrequently, it must be admitted, without rhythm.  Witness the following lines: 

  “Down the dark valley—­I saw.”—­
  “Trembling, I entered; beheld”—­
  “Thro’ the islands some divine bard.”—­

Nor are these by any means the only ones that might be cited in proof; and, indeed, even where there is nothing precisely contrary to rhythm, the verse might, generally speaking, almost be read as prose.  Seldom indeed, as it appears to us, is the attempt to write without some fixed laws of metrical construction attended with success; never, perhaps, can it be considered as the most appropriate embodiment of thought.  The fashion has obtained of late years; but it is a fashion, and will die out.  But few persons will doubt the superiority of the established blank verse, after reading the following passage, or will hesitate in pronouncing that it ought to be the rule, instead of the exception, in this poem: 

        “They see the merchants
        On the Oxus stream:—­but care
  Must visit first them too, and make them pale:
        Whether, thro’ whirling sand,
  A cloud of desert robber-horse has burst
  Upon their caravan; or greedy kings,
  In the walled cities the way passes thro’,
  Crushed them with tolls; or fever airs
        On some great river’s marge
        Mown them down, far from home.”—­p. 25.

The Reveller, going to join the train of Bacchus in his temple, has strayed into the house of Circe and has drunk of her cup:  he believes that, while poets can see and know only through participation in endurance, he shares the power belonging to the gods of seeing “without pain, without labour;” and has looked over the valley all day long at the Moenads and Fauns, and Bacchus, “sometimes, for a moment, passing through the dark stems.”  Apart from the inherent defects of the metre, there is great beauty of pictorial description in some passages of the poem, from which the following (where he is speaking of the gods) may be taken as a specimen:—­

        “They see the Indian
        Drifting, knife in hand,
        His frail boat moored to
      A floating isle, thick-matted
  With large-leaved low-creeping melon plants,