Or these:
_Peace lit upon a fluttering vein,
And self-forgetting on the brain;
On rifts by passion wrought again
Splashed from the sky of childhood rain,
And rid of afterthought were we
And from foreboding sweetly free.
Now falls the apple, bleeds the vine,
And, moved by some autumnal sign,
I who in spring was glad repine
And ache without my anodyne;
Oh! things that were! Oh! things that are!
Oh! setting of my double star!_
But these are rare, and the old unique _Ionica_ of thirty years
earlier is not repeated.
THE SHAVING OF SHAGPAT
THE SHAVING OF SHAGPAT. _An Arabian Entertainment. By George Meredith.
Chapman and Hall_. 1856.
It is nearly forty years since I first heard of _The Shaving of
Shagpat_. I was newly come, in all my callow ardour, into the covenant
of Art and Letters, and I was moving about, still bewildered, in a
new world. In this new world, one afternoon, Dante Gabriel Rossetti,
standing in front of his easel, remarked to all present whom it should
concern, that _The Shaving of Shagpat_ was a book which Shakespeare
might have been glad to write. I now understand that in the warm
Rossetti-language this did not mean that there was anything specially
reminiscent of the Bard of Avon in this book, but simply that it was
a monstrous fine production, and worthy of all attention.
Pages:
222
223
224
225
226
227
228
229
230
231
232
233
234
235
236
237
238
239
240
241
242
243
244
245
246