How many and how haunting these delicate oases are! Those who know and love "Pauline" will remember the passage where the poet, with that pantheistic ecstasy which was possibly inspired by the singer he most loved, tells how he can live the life of plants, content to watch the wild bees flitting to and fro, or to lie absorbent of the ardours of the sun, or, like the night-flowering columbine, to trail up the tree-trunk and through its rustling foliage "look for the dim stars;" or, again, can live the life of the bird, "leaping airily his pyramid of leaves and twisted boughs of some tall mountain-tree;" or be a fish, breathing the morning air in the misty sun-warm water. Close following this is another memorable passage, that beginning "Night, and one single ridge of narrow path;" which has a particular interest for two notes of a deeper and broader music to be evolved long afterwards. For, as it seems to me, in "Thou art so close by me, the roughest swell Of wind in the tree-tops hides not the panting Of thy soft breasts -----" (where, by the way, should be noticed the subtle correspondence between the conceptive and the expressional rhythm) we have a hint of that superb scene in "Pippa Passes," where, on a sinister night of July, a night of spiritual storm as well as of aerial tempest, Ottima and Sebald lie amid the lightning-searcht forest, with "the thunder like a whole sea overhead." Again, in the lovely Turneresque, or rather Shelleyan picture of morning, over "the rocks, and valleys, and old woods," with the high boughs swinging in the wind above the sun-brightened mists, and the golden-coloured spray of the cataract amid the broken rocks, whereover the wild hawks fly to and fro, there is at least a suggestion, an outline, of the truly magnificent burst of morning music in the poet's penultimate volume, beginning-- "But morning's laugh sets all the crags alight Above the baffled tempest: tree and tree Stir themselves from the stupor of the night, And every strangled branch resumes its right To breathe, shakes loose dark's clinging dregs, waves free In dripping glory. Prone the runnels plunge, While earth, distent with moisture like a sponge, Smokes up, and leaves each plant its gem to see, Each grass-blade's glory-glitter," etc. Who that has ever read "Pauline" will forget the masterful poetry descriptive of the lover's wild-wood retreat, the exquisite lines beginning "Walled in with a sloped mound of matted shrubs, tangled, old and green"? There is indeed a new, an unmistakable voice here. "And tongues of bank go shelving in the waters, Where the pale-throated snake reclines his head, And old grey stones lie making eddies there; The wild mice cross them dry-shod".... What lovelier image in modern poetry than that depictive of the forest-pool in depths of savage woodlands, unvisited but by the shadows of passing clouds,--