But one finds a more real example of Moore's poetry in this quatrain:-- "There's a beauty, for ever unchangingly bright, Like the long, sunny lapse of a summer day's light, Shining on, shining on, by no shadow made tender, Till Love falls asleep in its sameness of splendour." If one compares passages like these with, for instance, Cowper's anapaests, even in so beautiful a poem as "The poplars are felled, farewell to the shade," it will be seen that Moore helped on the extraordinary advance in poetical technique which marks the years from 1795 to the rise of Tennyson. Moore's sense of style is always faulty--witness the very next couplet:-- "This was not the beauty--_oh, nothing like this!_ That to young Nourmahal gave such magic of bliss." But he had a fine ear for metre, and in this poem he displayed all his resources, changing the rhythm half-a-dozen times, with interpolating bursts of song. When, in addition, we remember that the most indolent reader could never for an instant mistake his meaning--that the volume of thought was always light as compared with the faculty of expression--that every harshness was carefully smoothed away, and condensation always sacrificed to limpidity--it is not hard to understand the poem's popularity. Yet, when all has been said, the last word is that _Lalla Rookh_ is a work of very secondary merit, and retains its place in literature mainly as an example of an extinct taste. Twenty years after it was written, Moore knew this, and told Longman that, "in a race to future times (if any thing of mine could pretend to such a run), those little ponies, the _Melodies_, will beat the mare _Lalla_ hollow." And indeed, if it were not for the _Melodies_, nobody would now give an eye to their stable companion. [1] Parkinson. [2] Alluding to Rogers's poem "Italy." CHAPTER IV PERIOD OF RESIDENCE ABROAD Moore's residence on the Continent lasted three and a half years, and it formed an interlude in his life, interrupting what was otherwise a very continuous texture. The period was one of relative idleness, yet by no means of rest; and although whatever he produced during it was in verse, its close found the transition accomplished, from poet to man of letters.