“All the dead The melancholy attraction of Jesus felt: And millions, like a sea, wave upon wave, Heaved dreaming to that moonlight face, or ran In wonderful long ripples, sorrow-charmed. Toward him, in faded purple, pacing came Dead emperors, and sad, unflattered kings; Unlucky captains, listless armies led: Poets with music frozen on their lips Toward the pale brilliance sighed.” And it would be easy to multiply illustrations from _Marpessa_ and _By the Sea_. Occasionally there is a certain incongruity between the form and the matter. A poem so essentially, so intensely realistic as _The Wife_ should not have such quaintnesses as “palèd in her thought.” Nor should we have “The constable, with lifted hand, Conducting the orchestral Strand”; nor should a railway station be described as a “moonèd terminus.” Nothing is so disenchanting as affectation. One cannot but add that these poems, welcome as they are, would have been more welcome still, had they been less profoundly melancholy. Their monotonous sadness, the persistency with which they dwell on all those grim and melancholy realities which poetry should help us to forget, or cheer us in enduring, is not merely their leading, but their pervading characteristic. This note will, we hope, change. Leopardi is immortal, and could not be spared; but one Leopardi is enough for a single century. THE ILLUSTRIOUS OBSCURE[44] [Footnote 44: _West Country Poets: Their Lives and Works, etc._ Illustrated with Portraits. By W. H. Kearley Wright, F.R.H.S. London: Elliot Stock. 1896.]