Yet, somewhere, through mediaeval gloom and modern din, another spirit breathed upon him,--a spirit of green woods and blue waters, the freshness of May mornings, the prattle of tender infancy, the gambols of young lambs on the hill-side. From his childhood, Poetry walked hand in hand with Painting, and beguiled his loneliness with wild, sweet harmonies. Bred up amid the stately, measured, melodious platitudes of the eighteenth century, that Golden Age of commonplace, he struck down through them all with simple, untaught, unconscious directness, and smote the spring of ever-living waters. Such wood-notes wild as trill in Shakspeare's verse sprang from the stricken chords beneath his hand. The little singing-birds that seem almost to have leaped unbidden into life among the gross creations of those old Afreets who "Stood around the throne of Shakspeare, Sturdy, but unclean," carolled their clear, pure lays to him, and left a quivering echo. Fine, fleeting fantasies we have, a tender, heartfelt, heart-reaching pathos, laughter that might at any moment tremble into tears, eternal truths, draped in the garb of quaint and simple story, solemn fervors, subtile sympathies, and the winsomeness of little children at their play,--sometimes glowing with the deepest color, often just tinged to the pale and changing hues of a dream, but touched with such coy grace, modulated to such free, wild rhythm, suffused with such a delicate, evanishing loveliness, that they seem scarcely to be the songs of our tangible earth, but snatches from fairy-land. Often rude in form, often defective in rhyme, and not unfrequently with even graver faults than these, their ruggedness cannot hide the gleam of the sacred fire. "The Spirit of the Age," moulding her pliant poets, was wiser than to meddle with this sterner stuff. From what hidden cave in Rare Ben Jonson's realm did the boy bring such an opal as this SONG. "My silks and fine array, My smiles and languished air, By Love are driven away; And mournful, lean Despair Brings me yew to deck my grave: Such end true lovers have! "His face is fair as heaven, Where springing buds unfold; Oh, why to him was 't given, Whose heart is wintry cold? His breast is Love's all-worshipped tomb, Where all Love's pilgrims come. "Bring me an axe and spade, Bring me a winding-sheet; When I my grave have made, Let winds and tempests beat: Then down I'll lie, as cold as clay. True love doth pass away." What could the Spirit of the Age hope to do with a boy scarcely yet in his teens, who dared arraign her in such fashion as is set forth in his address TO THE MUSES. "Whether on Ida's shady brow, Or in the chambers of the East, The chambers of the Sun, that now From ancient melody have ceased; "Whether in heaven ye wander fair, Or the green corners of the earth, Or the blue regions of the air, Where the melodious winds have birth;