And ghastly thro’ the drizzling rain _On the bald street strikes the blank day._ —_In Memoriam._ See particularly _In Memoriam_, cvii., the lines beginning “Fiercely flies,” to “darken on the rolling brine”: the description of the island in _Enoch Arden_; but specification is needless, it applies to all his descriptive poetry. It is marvellous that he can produce such effects by such simple means: a mere enumeration of particulars will often do it, as here:— No gray old grange or lonely fold, Or low morass and whispering reed, Or simple style from mead to mead, Or sheep walk up the windy wold. —_In Memoriam,_ c. Or here:— The meal sacks on the whitened floor, The dark round of the dripping wheel, The very air about the door Made misty with the floating meal. —_The Miller’s Daughter._ His blank verse is best described by negatives. It has not the endless variety, the elasticity and freedom of Shakespeare’s, it has not the massiveness and majesty of Milton’s, it has not the austere grandeur of Wordsworth’s at its best, it has not the wavy swell, “the linked sweetness long drawn out” of Shelley’s, but its distinguishing feature is, if we may use the expression, its importunate beauty. What Coleridge said of Claudian’s style may be applied to it: “Every line, nay every word stops, looks full in your face and asks and begs for praise”. is earlier blank verse is less elaborate and seemingly more spontaneous and easy than his later.[3] But it is in his lyric verse that his rhythm is seen in its greatest perfection. No English lyrics have more magic or more haunting beauty, more of that which charms at once and charms for ever. In his description of nature he is incomparable. Take the following from _The Dying Swan_:— Some blue peaks in the distance rose, And white against the cold-white sky, Shone out their crowning snows. One willow over the river wept, And shook the wave as the wind did sigh; Above in the wind was the swallow, Chasing itself at its own wild will, or the opening scene in _Œnone_ and in _The Lotos Eaters_, or the meadow scene in _The Gardener’s Daughter_, or the conclusion of _Audley Court_, or the forest scene in the _Dream of Fair Women_, or this stanza in _Mariana in the South_:— There all in spaces rosy-bright Large Hesper glitter’d on her tears, And deepening through the silent spheres, Heaven over Heaven rose the night. A single line, nay, a single word, and a scene is by magic before us, as here where the sea is looked down upon from an immense height:— The _wrinkled_ sea beneath him _crawls_. —_The Eagle_. Or here of a ship at sea, in the distance:— And on through zones of light and shadow _Glimmer away to the lonely deep._ —_To the Rev. F. D. Maurice._ Or here of waters falling high up on mountains:— Their thousand _wreaths of dangling water-smoke._ —_The Princess._ Or of a water-fall seen at a distance:—