The blue-eyed vampire, sated at her feast,
Smiles bloodily against the leprous moon.
Of that last picture—ghastly enough, I grant you, to affect the spine of the Philistine with a chronic chill if he could understand it—I can only repeat here what I said elsewhere while the poem was in manuscript: that it seems to me not inferior in power upon the imagination to Coleridge’s
A savage place! as holy and enchanted
As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon lover,
or Keats’s
magic casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas, in faerie lands forlorn—
passages which Rossetti pronounced the two Pillars of Hercules of human thought.