A queenly gift that wears a regal dress
Of wine-flushed velvet blazoned with fine gold;
Sumptuous these lettered heralds that remain
Without the hall, bidding us enter there,
Proclaiming puissant titles for their queen;
More sumptuous still, the largesse and the feast
Of poesie within. Here in this Isle,
Where once were mighty poets, we have but known
A fugitive or sterile muse of late:
Across the sundering floods and leagues of foam,
On younger peoples in a riper clime
There falls no blight of song, but in full tide
Of passion, poets have blossomed year by year.
And greatest among these, O Wilcox, thou!
Song lived again in thee: no single note
Of human bliss or woe that did not come
Unto thy tutored and melodious tongue
And swell thy opulence of rhyme.
Shall we, who share a common speech, forget
Thy guerdon? Nay, not Tupper’s beaten gold,
Nor Mistress Hemans, that white garden rose
Of song, nor Bulwer Lytton’s mystic peaks
Of thought, nor Morris (Lewis of that name)
With all his large discourse and epic strain,
Shall move us more in the dark days to come.
PROFESSOR SAINTSBURY: FROM THE HISTORY OF THE THREE BLIND MICE (PERIODS
OF EUROPEAN NONSENSE)
Coming to the conclusion of the whole matter, the present writer, who
has more than once gone over all that has been written on the
subject--with the exception of some things in Romansch and Czech--while
he has been engaged on this task, must refuse to discuss at length the
motives of the mice or the far-reaching results to their seemingly
(though not to the literary critic or historian who has adopted the
comparative method) eccentric and ill-timed trick of ‘running after,’
both of which have engaged the attention of some very excellent persons
to the exclusion of all other aspects of the problem. Whoever looks at
such things with one eye open for the swing of the pendulum will not be
easily persuaded that the cleaving blade--for, let it be repeated, the
Farmer’s Wife is worthiest of attention here--has not the fullest
significance of all, from the _lever de rideau_ of the ‘running after’
to the noisy epilogue of the ‘Never saw such a thing in my life.’ To
some, whose _engouement_ for the Classical is not entirely absurd, the
structure of the three shorn rodents, in their new simplicity and
austerity of outline, will come almost as a ‘Pisgah-sight.’ As a
reaction from the fulltailed Romanticism that scampered blindly and
heedlessly after what seemed rather a new crotchet than a true ideal,
their attitude--not unforeseen at the time when the ‘Carving-knife’ was
first menacingly brandished--can at least be tolerated. But to the other
extremists, who from their stucco citadel of the sham Romantic have
derided the ‘cutting-off,’ and have hailed with contempt the new-old,
perhaps to them unfamiliar, form of the blind three, the present writer
can hold out no eirenicon. With the exception of some worthy persons who
ought to have known better, and who shall be nameless here, the scoffers
were for the most part half-educated journalists and other hangers-on to
letters, who imagine that it is possible to write a clear lucid style
without so much as a glance at Dionysius of Halicarnassus, and who
cannot be expected.... Etc., Etc.