Isbrand is the brother of the slain knight Wolfram: his foolery is but the disguise of his revenge, and thus he rails over the body of his brother: "Dead and gone! a scurvy burden to this ballad of life. There lies he, Siegfried--my brother, mark you--and I weep not, nor gnash the teeth, nor curse: and why not, Siegfried? Do you see this? So should every honest man be--cold, dead, and leaden-coffined. This was one who would be constant in friendship, and the pole wanders; one who would be immortal, and the light that shines upon his pale forehead now, through yonder gewgaw window, undulated from its star hundreds of years ago. That is constancy, that is life. O moral Nature!" It is unnecessary to try to describe the plot of this strange drama, if plot it may be called. The poem rather resembles the old bridge at Lucerne with the gloomy figures of the Dance of Death painted along its wormeaten sides, while over its old timbers rolls the current of busy life, and the laughter of children echoes from its roof. With the exception of Isbrand, the characters of the play are pale and shadowy enough, but the poetry that they speak is wonderful. The gloom and tender beauty of the verse are inextricably united, as in the plays of Webster, whose "intellectual twin" Beddoes might have been. Here is a lovely sketch of "a melancholy lady:" _Duke._ Thorwald, I fear hers is a broken heart. When first I met her in the Egyptian prison, She was the rosy morning of a woman: Beauty was rising, but the starry grace Of a calm childhood might be seen in her. But since the death of Wolfram, who fell there, Heaven and one single soul only know how, I have not dared to look upon her sorrow. _Thorwald._ Methinks she's too unearthly beautiful. Old as I am, I cannot look at her, And hear her voice, that touches the heart's core, Without a dread that she will fade o' th' instant. There's too much heaven in her; oft it rises, And, pouring out about the lovely earth, Almost dissolves it. She is tender too; And melancholy is the sweet pale smile With which she gently does reproach her fortune But the greatest beauty of this singular poem, with its wild medley of jesters and spirits, knights and fiends, Deaths and tender women, "like flowers on a grave," is the wonderful perfection of its songs. There are no less than thirteen in this play, some of them the wild mockery remind us of their faults. A turgid inflation in the tragic passages, a tendency to bombast, even more apparent in the man of forty-six than in the boy of nineteen, mar the calm strength of many of his scenes. The cloying sweetness that overloaded the verses of his juvenile work he left behind him as he grew older, but the Marlowe-like extravagance that noted in the soliloquies of _Hesperus_ still comes to the surface occasionally in the pages of _Death's Jest-Book_. It is the extravagance of strength, however, not of weakness.