“Sweet Thames, run softly till I end my song!”
Mr. Upson not only obeys by artist instinct the laws of counterpoint, but employs the word with the music in it, and his effects are achieved by the innate harmony of his diction and the poetry in the theme he is shaping. Take as an illustration of this his Octave upon the “Roman Glassware Preserved in the Ashmolean.” Doubtless those fragments of crystal, sheathed, by centuries in the earth, in a translucent film through which shine tints of mother-of-pearl, have met the eyes of many of us, but it needed a poet to deduce from them this illustration:
Fair crystal cups are dug from earth’s old crust,
Shattered but lovely, for, at price of all
Their shameful exile from the banquet-hall,
They have been bargaining beauties from the dust.
So, dig my life but deep enough, you must
Find broken friendships round its inner wall—
Which once my careless hand let slip and fall—
Brave with faint memories, rich in rainbow-rust!