"'Twas when the world was in its prime, When the fresh stars had just begun Their race of glory, and young Time Told his first birthdays by the sun; When, in the light of Nature's dawn Rejoicing, men and angels met On the high hill and sunny lawn, Ere sorrow came, or Sin had drawn 'Twixt man and heav'n her curtain yet! When earth lay nearer to the skies Than in those days of crime and woe, And mortals saw without surprise, In the mid air, angelic eyes Gazing upon this world below." Moore had abandoned the heroic couplet, and also the anapæstic measure, in favour of the eight-syllabled iambic, used with skilful variations of rhyme. And it is a proof of his matured judgment, that there is none of the tendency to melodrama which disfigures _Lalla Rookh_. He had realised that horror was not for him to convert to beauty; he tears no passion to tatters. Indeed, in the one instance where he plunges into a melodramatic subject, describing the fate of Lilis shrivelled to ashes by the embrace of her lover, and her unblest kiss, printed with "Hell's everlasting element," the vehemence is more impressive because more restrained. At the same time, it does not seem probable that any current of taste will bring back either the _Loves of the Angels_ or _Lalla_ into popularity. Everywhere, even in the beautiful passage on wedlock's consolations, ornament is pushed to redundancy; there is no concentration in the style. The same looseness of texture may be observed in Scott and Byron, but Scott and Byron have behind their work a weight of personality which is lacking in Moore. They are moreover closer in touch with reality than Moore, who attributes to himself in the Diary "that kind of imagination which is chilled by the real scene and can best describe what it has not seen, merely taking it from the descriptions of others." He quotes Milton and Dante as instances where this kind of imagination produces the noblest work. One can only say--and Moore would have been prompt to agree--that Thomas Moore was neither Dante nor Milton; and for poets of a lower order we want close touch with fact. Moore's gift, indeed, was not imagination. His highest talent lay, like that of Horace, in giving expression to common emotions, which belong rather to a race, or a class, than to an individual, and which are consequently very general, though not very poignant, in their appeal.