Break, break, break, on its _cold_ gray stones,-- and a southern, which has seen a hot sea on hot sand break into lightning of phosphor flame--half a mile of fire in an instant--following in time, like the flash of minute-guns. Then come the great new ideas of order and time, and I did but tell her she mistook her _frets_, And bowed her hand, etc., and so the timely succession of either ball, flower, or dentil, in architecture: but this, again, going off to a totally different and still lovely idea, the main one in the word _aurifrigium_--which rooted once in _aurifex_, went on in Etruscan work, followed in Florence into a much closer connection with _frigidus_--their style being always in _frosted_ gold (see the dew on a cabbage-leaf or, better, on a gray lichen, in early sunshine)--going back, nobody knows how far, but to the Temple of the Dew of Athens, and gold of Mycenæ, anyhow; and in Etruria to the Deluge, I suppose. Well, then, the notion of the music of morning comes in--with strings of lyre (or _frets_ of Katharine's instrument, whatever it was) and stops of various _quills_; which gets us into another group beginning with _plectrum_, going aside again into _plico_ and _plight_, and Milton's "Play in the plighted clouds" (the quills on the fretful porcupine are all thought of, first, in their piped complexity like rushes, _before_ the standing up in ill-temper), and so on into the _plight_ of folded drapery, and round again to our blanket. I think that's enough to sketch out the compass of the word. Of course the real power of it in any place depends on the writer's grasp of it, and use of the facet he wants to cut with. [From "The Theatre," March, 1880, p. 169.] "_THE MERCHANT OF VENICE._"[163] _6th Feb._, 1880. I have no doubt that whatever Mr. Irving has stated that I said, I _did_ say. But in personal address to an artist, to whom one is introduced for the first time, one does not usually say _all_ that may be in one's mind. And if expressions, limited, if not even somewhat exaggerated, by courtesy, be afterwards quoted as a total and carefully-expressed criticism, the general reader will be--or may be easily--much misled. I did and _do_ much admire Mr. Irving's own acting of Shylock. But I entirely dissent (and indignantly as well as entirely) from his general reading and treatment of the play. And I think that a modern audience will _invariably_ be not only wrong, but diametrically and with polar accuracy opposite to the real view of any great author in the moulding of his work. So far as I could in kindness venture, I expressed my feelings to that effect, in a letter which I wrote to Mr. Irving on the day after I saw the play; and I should be sincerely obliged to him, under the existing circumstances, if he would publish THE WHOLE of that letter. FOOTNOTES: