"Come then, sorrow! Sweetest sorrow! Like an own babe I nurse thee on my breast: I thought to leave thee, And deceive thee, But now of all the world I love thee best. There is not one, No, no, not one But thee to comfort a poor lonely maid; Thou art her mother And her brother, Her playmate, and her wooer in the shade." The high-water-mark of poetry in _Endymion_ is thus reached in the two lyrics of the first and fourth book. Of these at least may be said with justice that which Jeffrey was inclined to say of the poem as a whole, that the degree to which any reader appreciates them will furnish as good a test as can be obtained of his having in him "a native relish for poetry, and a genuine sensibility to its intrinsic charm." In the main body of the work, beauties and faults are so bound up together that a critic may well be struck almost as much by one as by the other. Admirable truth and charm of imagination, exquisite freshness and felicity of touch, mark such brief passages as we have quoted above: the very soul of poetry breathes in them, and in a hundred others throughout the work: but read farther, and you will in almost every case be brought up by hardly tolerable blemishes of execution and of taste. Thus in the tale told by Glaucus, we find a line of strong poetic vision such as-- "Ææa's isle was wondering at the moon," standing alone in a passage of rambling and ineffective over-honeyed narrative; or again, a couplet forced and vulgar like this both in rhyme and expression-- "I look'd--'twas Scylla! Cursed, cursed Circe! O vulture-witch, hast never heard of mercy?" is followed three lines farther on by a masterly touch of imagination and the heart:-- "Cold, O cold indeed Were her fair limbs, and like a common weed The sea-swell took her hair."