regular and plainly accented strain, recognized as heard before, comes into the music, as he pleases himself in fancying that the sad consolation is still left him of ornamenting the hearse. It is useless to speak of the exquisite finish of these lines, or of how often one word, as “fresh” for instance, in line 138, calls up before the mind such pictures that one lingers and lingers over the passage, as the poet’s fancy in vain effort lingered, striving to forget his sorrow. This strain comes in like some of the repeating melodies in the second part of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, where it seems as if the soul had found a new, sweet thought, and was turning it over and over as loth to pause, and as in sudden hope of some relief through its potency. But the heavy key-note strikes again through it all, in line 154, with a crash that drowns all the sweetness and beauty. We hear the rush of the cruel, insatiate sea, as its waves dash against the shore of the stormy Hebrides, and the conflict of wave and wind takes possession of us. What thought is more desolate than that of a solitary human form, tossed hither and thither in the vast immensity of ocean! Perhaps, even now, it floats by “the great vision of the guarded mount.” It seems to the poet that all should turn toward England in her sorrow, and it pains him to think of St. Michael’s steadfast eyes gazing across the waves of the bay toward “Namancos and Bayona’s hold.” “Rather turn hither and let even your heavenly face relax with human grief, and ye, unheeding monsters of the deep, have pity and bear him gently over the roughening waves.” This he says because he feels his own impotence. All the love he bears Lycidas cannot serve him now; he is lost, and helpless, and alone, and uncared for. By opposition here, the light strikes in once more, and now with a clearer, fuller glow than at either previous time. At first (line 76) it came in the form of trust in “all-judging Jove”; then (line 130) in hope, through belief in impersonal justice; now it takes the form of Christian faith. The music mounts higher and higher into celestial harmonies, losing entirely its original character, and sounds like a majestic choral of triumph and peace. This properly ends the poem with line 185. There is nothing more to be said. The tendency is all upward, and the collisions are overcome. One knows that here, and here for the first time, have we reached a movement that is self-sustained. There is no more danger of being carried off our basis by any wave of despairing sorrow. The soul has found a solution at last, and it knows that it is a trustworthy one.