The other is a song, more than a song, in Pippa Passes, a true piece of early folk-romance, with a faint touch of Greek story, wedded to Eastern and mediæval elements, in its roving imaginations. It is admirably pictorial, and the air which broods over it is the sunny and still air which, in men's fancy, was breathed by the happy children of the Golden Age. I quote a great part of it:
A King lived long ago,
In the morning of the world,
When earth was nigher heaven than now:
And the King's locks curled,
Disparting o'er a forehead full
As the milk-white space 'twixt horn and horn
Of some sacrificial bull—
Only calm as a babe new-born:
For he was got to a sleepy mood,