The seventh line again is an alliteration of alternate "p" and "d."
/P/ant /d/umbly /p/assionate with /d/reams of youth.
The tenth line is an excruciating alliteration in sibilants.
/F/eed/s/ the /f/amed /s/tream that water/s/ Andalu/s/.
But it must be admitted that the next line is graceful—
And loiters, amorous of the fragrant air.
The whole introduction of some 400 lines is full of beautiful images, fine thoughts, and striking phrases, but it is crowded, artificial, brocaded to excess with trop de choses; and it suddenly breaks into drama, with dialogue in person. This alternation of dramatic form and dialogue with epical narrative, interlarding the tragedy in parts with portentously long explanatory comment, is perhaps the most unlucky novelty which was ever attempted in verse. What would one say if even fine passages out of Wordsworth's Excursion had been accidentally bound up between the pages of Shakespeare's Hamlet?
But it is needless to enlarge on all the metrical and poetic defects of this medley of nearly 10,000 lines, with its lip-twisting, ear-torturing lyrics—(was there ever such a cacophony as—
O the sweet sweet prime
Of the past spring-time!)—
with its strange alternations of action and narration, its soliloquies of 150 unbroken lines, and all its other incongruities. The important point is, that it has a really grand scheme, that the characters of Zarca and of Fedalma are lofty, impressive, and nobly dramatic, that the whole poem is, in conception, a work of power and true imagination. Just as Kingsley, who had far greater poetic faculty than George Eliot, mistook in making the Saint's Tragedy a drama, when he might have made it a grand historical romance, so George Eliot made a cruel mistake in writing the Spanish Gypsy as a poem, when she might have written it as an historical romance—a romance, it may be, much superior to Romola, as the subject and the conception were on grander lines.