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the stern faces, soldier-like, silent, unruffled,

the slow sacred music that floats over all.”

This is beautiful, and no less beautiful is the tenderness of his love.

“A grim grey coast, and a sea-board ghastly,

and shores trod seldom by feet of men—

where the batter’d hulk and the broken mast lie,

they have lain embedded these long years ten.

Love! when we wandered here together,

hand in hand through the sparkling weather,

from the heights and hollows of fern and heather,

God surely loved us a little then.”

Nor is it rare to find passages in him

“with the song like the song of a maiden,

with the scent like the scent of a flower.”

For “dark and true and tender is the north” with all its storm and stress.

Poor “sick stock-rider” and poet, with his wild eyes and wild words, and that “shyness and reserve which kept him locked up, as it were, in himself!” Our proud, passionate heart “out-wore its breast” as “the sword outwears its sheath,” and so we “took our rest,” but not before we had won our resignation and known, or almost known, the truth, even as Empedocles did, and yet died because “he was come too late”—or too soon—