A little lowly Hermitage it was,
Down in a dale, hard by a forest side.
No amount of elaboration and detail would enable one to see the Hermitage better, or indeed, as well; and the lyrical freedom of the ostensibly iambic verse gives to it an irresistible charm.”
“And, over and over again, if I may say so, gives to the blank verse of your dramas the same magical quality that a more stately treatment of it can never confer. But where is Milton?”
“One sees him but seldom,” he replied; “and when Chaucer and I do catch sight of him, we behave rather like truant schoolboys, and put on a grave face, especially if he finds us in one of our lighter moods. We are all rather in awe of him, for he never stoops to playfulness; and Chaucer, who is rather irreverent sometimes, says he is so uniformly sublime as now and then to be ridiculous. But, in our hearts, we greatly revere him. To tell the truth, I think he prefers Wordsworth’s company to ours; and we find more congenial society from time to time in—look! that handsome youth, who carries his head with unconscious pride, and even here seems half-discontented. The best is never good enough for him, and he cannot be deluded even by his own illusions, poor fellow!”
“It’s Byron,” I said, “is it not?”
“Yes, there is no mistaking him; part man, part god, part devil. I believe there was some doubt about admitting him here, lest he should rouse even the Elysian Fields to mutiny, and a question whether he should not have an enclosure all to himself. But he is a man of the world, and knows how to behave himself when he chooses; and, when one of his misanthropic moods comes over him, he wanders about scowling and muttering like a gathering thunderstorm. I am told he breaks bounds sometimes to go in search of Sappho. There would be a pair of them, would there not? What an explosive power there was in him! for in the mind, as in your melanite, force packs small.”
“And Shelley? Where is Shelley?”
“Where the bee sucks, I suspect; for he is the very Ariel of our company; ever, even here, in search of the unattainable! But he is a great favourite with all of us, he is so lovable.”
“And the poet who has delighted my own generation,” I inquired. “Surely he is among you.”
“Not yet,” he replied; “though I have not the least doubt he will be, in due course. No one is admitted here until he has been dead for fifty years; Time, the door-keeper and guardian of Eternity, being more deliberate than the janitors of Westminster Abbey, who, you must allow, make some rather ludicrous blunders in admitting, on the very morrow of their decease, at the importunity of friends and associates, persons for whom, half a century later, no one will dream of claiming any special posthumous distinction.”