Or like this :

And now 'twas like all instruments,

Now like a lonely flute;

And now it is an angel's song,

That makes the heavens be mute.

The silver sounding instruments did meet
With the base murmur of the Water's fall:
The Water's fall with difference discrete,

Now soft, now loud, unto the Wind did call :
The gentle warbling Wind low answered to all.

Of sound and light together, like this:-
A sunny shaft did I behold,

From sky to earth it slanted:
And poised therein a bird so bold-
Sweet bird, thou wert enchanted!
He sank, he rose, he twinkled, he trolled
Within that shaft of sunny mist;
His eyes of fire, his beak of gold,
All else of amethyst !

And thus he sang: "Adieu! adieu!
Love's dreams prove seldom true.
The blossoms, they make no delay :
The sparkling dewdrops will not stay.
Sweet month of May,

We must away;

Far, far away!
To-day! to-day!"

Again, it is some stroke of personification that fills us with amazement—where we thought that Nature was most solitary, see! some one is present!

The nightingale, up-perched high,

And cloister'd among cool and bunched leaves-
She sings but to her love, nor e'er conceives

How tiptoe Night holds back her dark-grey hood.

Or, it may be, the presence is that of Great Nature herselfand she feels what we feel, and knows what we know :—

O fair is Love's first hope to gentle mind!

As Eve's first star thro' fleecy cloudlet peeping;
And sweeter than the gentle south-west wind,
O'er willowy meads and shadowed waters creeping,
And Ceres' golden fields;—the sultry hind
Meets it with brow uplift, and stays his reaping.

し

Lastly, it is perhaps but the turn of a phrase or the fall of

a cadence that touches the heart:

I heard a linnet courting

His lady in the spring;

His mates were idly sporting,

Nor stayed to hear him sing
His song
of love :-

I fear my speech distorting

His tender love.

So much by way of illustrating poetic effect produced, as only the inspired poet knows how to produce it, by very simple means. I venture to ask the student of Plato to believe with me that the effect produced, in the passages just quoted, by these simple means, does not differ in kind from that produced by the use of elaborate apparatus in the Myths with which this work is concerned. The effect is always the induction of the dream-consciousness, with its atmosphere of solemn feeling spreading out into the waking consciousness which follows.

It will be well, however, not to confine ourselves to the examples given, but to quote some other examples from Poetry, in which this effect is produced in a way more closely parallel to that in which it is produced in the Platonic Myths. I will therefore ask the reader to submit himself to an experiment: first, to take the three following passages-all relating to Death--and carefully reading and re-reading them, allow the effect of them to grow upon him; and then, turning to Plato's Eschatological Myths in the Phaedo, Gorgias, and Republic, and reading them in the same way, to ask himself whether or no he has had a foretaste of their effect in the effect produced by these other pieces. I venture to think that the more we habituate ourselves to the influence of the Poets the better are we likely to receive the message of the Prophets.

Deh peregrini, che pensosi andate
Forse di cosa che non v' è presente,
Venite voi di sì lontana gente,
Come alla vista voi ne dimostrate?
Che non piangete, quando voi passate

1 La Vita Nuova, § 41, Sonetto 24.

Per lo suo mezzo la città dolente,
Come quelle persone, che neente
Par che intendesser la sua gravitate.
Se voi restate, per volerla udire,

Certo lo core ne' sospir mi dice,
Che lagrimando n' uscirete pui.
Ella ha perduta la sua Beatrice;

E le parole, ch' uom di lei può dire,
Hanno virtù di far piangere altrui.

To that high Capital, where Kingly Death
Keeps his pale court in beauty and decay,
He came and bought, with price of purest breath,
A grave among the eternal.-Come away!
Haste, while the vault of blue Italian day
Is yet his fitting charnel-roof! while still
He lies, as if in dewy sleep he lay;
Awake him not surely he takes his fill
Of deep and liquid rest, forgetful of all ill.

He will awake no more-oh, never more!
Within the twilight chamber spreads apace
The shadow of white Death, and at the door
Invisible Corruption waits to trace
His extreme way to her dim dwelling-place;
The eternal Hunger sits, but pity and awe
Soothe her pale rage, nor dares she to deface
So fair a prey, till darkness and the law

Of change shall o'er his sleep the mortal curtain draw.

Oh, weep for Adonais !-The quick Dreams,

The passion-winged Ministers of thought,

Who were his flocks, whom near the living streams
Of his young spirit he fed, and whom he taught

The love which was its music, wander not,-
Wander no more from kindling brain to brain,

But droop there, whence they sprung; and mourn their lot
Round the cold heart, where, after their sweet pain,
They ne'er will gather strength, nor find a home again.

And one with trembling hand clasps his cold head,
And fans him with her moonlight wings, and cries:
“Our love, our hope, our sorrow, is not dead;
See, on the silken fringe of his faint eyes,
Like dew upon a sleeping flower, there lies
A tear some Dream has loosened from his brain."

1 Shelley, Adonais.

Lost Angel of a ruined Paradise!

She knew not 'twas her own; as with no stain She faded, like a cloud which had outwept its rain.

One from a lucid urn of starry dew

Washed his light limbs, as if embalming them;
Another clipt her profuse locks, and threw
The wreath upon him, like an anadem,
Which frozen tears instead of pearls begem ;
Another in her wilful grief would break
Her bow and winged reeds, as if to stem

A greater loss with one which was more weak;
And dull the barbèd fire against his frozen cheek.

Another Splendour on his mouth alit,

That mouth whence it was wont to draw the breath
Which gave it strength to pierce the guarded wit,
And pass into the panting heart beneath

With lightning and with music: the damp death
Quenched its caress upon his icy lips;

And, as a dying meteor stains a wreath

Of moonlight vapour, which the cold night clips, It flushed through his pale limbs, and passed to its eclipse.

And others came,-Desires and Adorations,
Winged Persuasions, and veiled Destinies,
Splendours, and Glooms, and glimmering Incarnations
Of hopes and fears, and twilight Phantasies;

And Sorrow, with her family of Sighs,

And Pleasure, blind with tears, led by the gleam

Of her own dying smile instead of eyes,

Came in slow pomp;-the moving pomp might seem

Like pageantry of mist on an autumnal stream.

All he had loved and moulded into thought
From shape, and hue, and odour, and sweet sound,
Lamented Adonais. Morning sought

Her eastern watch-tower, and her hair unbound,
Wet with the tears which should adorn the ground,
Dimmed the aerial eyes that kindle day;

Afar the melancholy thunder moaned,
Pale Ocean in unquiet slumber lay,

And the wild winds flew around, sobbing in their dismay.

Lost Echo sits amid the voiceless mountains,
And feeds her grief with his remembered lay,
And will no more reply to winds or fountains,
Or amorous birds perched on the young green spray,
Or herdsman's horn, or bell at closing day;
Since she can mimic not his lips, more dear

Than those for whose disdain she pined away
Into a shadow of all sounds :-a drear

Murmur, between their songs, is all the woodmen hear.

Alas! that all we loved of him should be,

But for our grief, as if it had not been,
And grief itself be mortal! Woe is me!
Whence are we, and why are we? of what scene

The actors or spectators? Great and mean

Meet massed in death, who lends what life must borrow.
As long as skies are blue, and fields are green,

Evening must usher night, night urge the morrow, Month follow month with woe, and year wake year to sorrow.

Peace, peace! he is not dead, he doth not sleep

He hath awakened from the dream of life

'Tis we, who, lost in stormy visions, keep
With phantoms an unprofitable strife,

And in mad trance strike with our spirit's knife
Invulnerable nothings-We decay

Like corpses in a charnel; fear and grief
Convulse us and consume us day by day,

And cold hopes swarm like worms within our living clay.

He has outsoared the shadow of our night;
Envy and calumny, and hate and pain,
And that unrest which men miscall delight,
Can touch him not and torture not again;
From the contagion of the world's slow stain
He is secure, and now can never mourn

A heart grown cold, a head grown grey in vain ;
Nor, when the spirit's self has ceased to burn,
With sparkless ashes load an unlamented urn.

He is made one with Nature: there is heard
His voice in all her music, from the moan
Of thunder to the song of night's sweet bird;
He is a presence to be felt and known

In darkness and in light, from herb and stone,
Spreading itself where'er that Power may move
Which has withdrawn his being to its own;
Which wields the world with never-wearied love,
Sustains it from beneath, and kindles it above.