War that shatters her slain, And peace that grinds them as grain. These have become famous. The suggestion is that peace is more cruel than war. In battle a man is dashed to pieces, and his pain is immediately over. In the competition of civil life, the weak and the stupid, no matter how good or moral they may be, are practically crushed by the machinery of Western civilisation, as grain might be crushed in a mill. In the last stanza of the composition you will doubtless have observed the pathetic reference to the meaning of the song of the sea, mysterious and awful beyond all other sounds of nature. Rossetti has not failed to consider this sound, philosophically and emotionally, in one of his most beautiful poems. And now I want to show you, by illustration, the difference between a really pessimistic treatment of a subject and Rossetti's treatment of it. Perhaps the very finest example of pessimism in Victorian poetry is a sonnet by Lee-Hamilton, on the subject of a sea-shell. You know that if you take a large sea-shell of a particular form, and hold it close to your ear, you will hear a sound like the sound of the surf, as if the ghost of the sea were in the shell. Nearly all English children have the experience of listening to the sound of the sea in a shell; it startles them at first; but nobody tells them what the sound really is, for that would spoil their surprise and delight. You must not tell a child that there are no ghosts or fairies. Well, Rossetti and Lee-Hamilton wrote about this sound of the sea in a shell--but how differently! Here is Lee-Hamilton's composition: The hollow sea-shell, which for years hath stood On dusty shelves, when held against the ear Proclaims its stormy parent; and we hear The faint far murmur of the breaking flood. We hear the sea. The sea? It is the blood In our own veins, impetuous and near, And pulses keeping pace with hope and fear, And with our feelings' ever-shifting mood. Lo! in my heart I hear, as in a shell, The murmur of a world beyond the grave, Distinct, distinct, though faint and far it be. Thou fool; this echo is a cheat as well,-- The hum of earthly instincts; and we crave A world unreal as the shell-heard sea.