“But round the North, a light, A belt, it seem’d, of luminous vapour, lay, And ever in it a low musical note Swell’d up and died; and, as it swell’d, a ridge Of breaker issued from the belt, and still Grew with the growing note, and when the note Had reach’d a thunderous fulness, on those cliffs Broke, mixt with awful light (the same as that Living within the belt) whereby she saw That all those lines of cliffs were cliffs no more, But huge cathedral fronts of every age, Grave, florid, stern, as far as eye could see, One after one: and then the great ridge drew, Lessening to the lessening music, back, And past into the belt and swell’d again Slowly to music: ever when it broke The statues, king or saint or founder fell; Then from the gaps and chasms of ruin left Came men and women in dark clusters round, Some crying, ‘Set them up! they shall not fall!’ And others, ‘Let them lie, for they have fall’n.’ And still they strove and wrangled: and she grieved In her strange dream, she knew not why, to find Their wildest wailings never out of tune With that sweet note; and ever as their shrieks Ran highest up the gamut, that great wave Returning, while none mark’d it, on the crowd Broke, mixt with awful light, and show’d their eyes Glaring, and passionate looks, and swept away The men of flesh and blood, and men of stone, To the waste deeps together. ‘Then I fixt My wistful eyes on two fair images, Both crown’d with stars and high among the stars,— The Virgin Mother standing with her child High up on one of those dark minster-fronts— Till she began to totter, and the child Clung to the mother, and sent out a cry Which mixt with little Margaret’s, and I woke, And my dream awed me:—well—but what are dreams?” The passage is rather fitted for a despairing mood of Arthur, in the Idylls, than for the wife of the city clerk ruined by a pious rogue. The _Lucretius_, later published, is beyond praise as a masterly study of the great Roman sceptic, whose heart is at eternal odds with his Epicurean creed. Nascent madness, or fever of the brain drugged by the blundering love philtre, is not more cunningly treated in the mad scenes of _Maud_. No prose commentary on the _De Rerum Natura_, however long and learned, conveys so clearly as this concise study in verse the sense of magnificent mingled ruin in the mind and poem of the Roman.