"--p. 25.
The Reveller, going to join the train of Bacchus in his temple, has
strayed into the house of Circe and has drunk of her cup: he believes
that, while poets can see and know only through participation in
endurance, he shares the power belonging to the gods of seeing
"without pain, without labour;" and has looked over the valley all
day long at the Moenads and Fauns, and Bacchus, "sometimes, for a
moment, passing through the dark stems." Apart from the inherent
defects of the metre, there is great beauty of pictorial description
in some passages of the poem, from which the following (where he is
speaking of the gods) may be taken as a specimen:--
"They see the Indian
Drifting, knife in hand,
His frail boat moored to
A floating isle, thick-matted
With large-leaved low-creeping melon plants,
And the dark cucumber.
He reaps and stows them,
Drifting--drifting:--round him,
Round his green harvest-plot,
Flow the cool lake-waves:
The mountains ring them."--p. 20.
From "the Sick King in Bokhara," we have already quoted at some
length. It is one of the most considerable, and perhaps, as being the
most simple and life-like, the best of the narrative poems. A vizier
is receiving the dues from the cloth merchants, when he is summoned
to the presence of the king, who is ill at ease, by Hussein: "a
teller of sweet tales.
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