But stretch to me that hand so soft and white,
That seemed my own, that sad, sweet little while,
And all grows day, for ever dead the night.”
He was not at all sure when he read it the eighth or ninth time that the mantle of the “Sun-treader” [155] ]had not fallen upon him, that Helicon’s drying fount would not spring up afresh at his bidding.
Other men in love, he knew, had made verses, but they were of the mawkish, sentimental kind his more fastidious taste rejected, the kind that generally began something like—
“Oh, Star of Beauty, all the night
Thou shinest in the sky;
For thee the dark doth grow quite bright—
Oh, hear my plaintive sigh!”
His, he felt, were strong with the strength born of fathomless misery, and sweet with the bitter-sweet of undying and spurned love.