Will no one tell me what she sings? Perhaps the plaintive numbers flow For old, unhappy, far-off things, And battles long ago: Or is it some more humble lay, Familiar matter of to-day? Some natural sorrow, loss, or pain, That has been, and may be again! Wordsworth’s great contemporaries, each in his own way, in terms of his own temperament, were guided by the same principle. The whole nature of Burns’s genius was governed by his will to sing the common speech of Scotland into immortality. The _beau monde_, the gaming rooms and the prize-ring, the purlieus of scandal and the solitudes of romantic exile filled with the whispers of poetry and heroic history, the world of new loves and lost causes, of literary loyalties and animosities, among which Byron moved indifferently, in or out of temper, all spoke their own language in the motley of his verse. To know the poet and his environment is to see the same essential man in-- Smart uniforms and sparkling coronets Are spurned in turn, until her turn arrives, After male loss of time, and hearts, and bets Upon the sweepstakes for substantial wives; And when at last the pretty creature gets Some gentleman, who fights, or writes, or drives, It soothes the awkward squad of the rejected To find how very badly she selected ... and in-- The mountains look on Marathon-- And Marathon looks on the sea; And musing there an hour alone, I dreamed that Greece might still be free; For standing on the Persians’ grave, I could not deem myself a slave. Even Shelley, or that mood in him that was preoccupied with the fiery pinnacles in the clouds, kept the diction of his most ethereal flights in tune with the same instinctive necessity. The glory of her being, issuing thence, Stains the dead, blank, cold air, with a warm shade Of unentangled intermixture, made By Love, of light and motion: one intense Diffusion, one serene Omnipresence, Whose flowing outlines mingle in their flowing, Around her cheeks and utmost fingers glowing With the unintermitted blood, which there Quivers (as in a fleece of snow-like air The crimson pulse of living morning quiver). Continuously prolonged, and ending never, Till they are lost, and in that Beauty furled Which penetrates and clasps and fills the world; Scarce visible from extreme loveliness ...