From a Cornish Window / A New Edition - Arthur Quiller-Couch

"'Thou animatest ancient tales,
To prove our world of linear seed;
Thy very virtue now assails
A tempter to mislead.'

"Faint, yet pursuing, I hope; but I must admit that such writing does not obviously allure, that it rather dejects the student by the difficulty of finding a stool to sit down and be stoical on. 'Nay,' to parody Sidney, 'he dooth as if your journey should lye through a fayre Vineyard, at the first give you a handful of nuts, forgetting the nut-crackers.' He is, in short, half his time forbiddingly difficult, and at times to all appearance so deliberately and yet so wantonly difficult, that you wonder what on earth you came out to pursue and why you should be tearing your flesh in these thickets.

"And then you remember the swinging cadences of 'Love in the Valley' —the loveliest love-song of its century. Who can forget it?

"'Lovely are the curves of the white owl sweeping
Wavy in the dusk lit by one large star,
Lone on the fir-branch, his rattle-note unvaried,
Brooding o'er the gloom, spins the brown evejar.
Darker grows the valley, more and more forgetting;
So were it with me if forgetting could be willed.
Tell the grassy hollow that holds the bubbling well-spring,
Tell it to forget the source that keeps it filled.'

"And you swear that no thickets can be so dense but you will wrestle through them in the hope of hearing that voice again, or even an echo of it.

"'Melampus,' 'The Nuptials of Attila,' 'The Day of the Daughter of Hades,' 'The Empty Purse,' 'Jump-to-Glory Jane,' and the splendid 'Phœbus with Admetus'—you come back to each again and again, compelled by the wizardry of single lines and by a certain separate glamour which hangs about each of them. Each of them is remembered by you as in its own way a superb performance; lines here and there so haunt you with their beauty that you must go back and read the whole poem over for the sake of them. Other lines you boggle over, and yet cannot forget them; you hope to like them better at the next reading; you re-read, and wish them away, yet find them, liked or disliked, so embedded in your memory that you cannot do without them. Take, for instance, the last stanza of 'Phœbus with Admetus':—

"'You with shelly horns, rams! and promontory goats,
You whose browsing beards dip in coldest dew!
Bulls that walk the pasture in kingly-flashing coats!
Laurel, ivy, vine, wreathed for feasts not few!
You that build the shade-roof, and you that court the rays,
You that leap besprinkling the rock stream-rent;
He has been our fellow, the morning of our days;
Us he chose for house-mates, and this way went.'

"The first thing that made this stanza unforgettable was the glorious third line: almost as soon 'promontory goats' fastened itself on memory; and almost as soon the last two lines were perceived to be excellent, and the fourth also. These enforced you, for the pleasure of recalling them, to recall the whole, and so of necessity to be hospitably minded toward the fifth and sixth lines, which at first repelled as being too obscurely and almost fantastically expressed. Having once passed it in, I find 'You that leap besprinkling the rock stream-rent,' with its delicate labial pause and its delicate consonantal chime, one of the most fascinating lines in the stanza. And since, after being the hardest of all to admit, it has become one of the best liked, I am forced in fairness to ask myself if hundreds of lines of Mr. Meredith's which now seem crabbed or fantastic may not justify themselves after many readings.