"'To give our hearts up! fie!—That rage
Barbaric, antedates the age!
It is not done on any stage.
"'Because your scald or gleeman went
With seven or nine-string'd instrument
Upon his back—must ours be bent?
"'We are not pilgrims, by your leave,
No, nor yet martyrs! if we grieve,
It is to rhyme to ... summer eve.
"'And if we labour, it shall be
As suiteth best with our degree,
In after-dinner reverie.'
"More yet that speaker would have said—
Poising between his smiles fair-fed,
Each separate phrase till finished:
"But all the foreheads of those born
And dead true poets flash'd with scorn
Betwixt the bay leaves round them worn—
"Ay, jetted such brave fire, that they,
The new-come, shrank and paled away,
Like leaden ashes when the day
"Strikes on the hearth! A spirit-blast,
A presence known by power, at last
Took them up mutely—they had pass'd!"
"Lady Geraldine's Courtship" is a poem of the Tennysonian school. Some pith is put forth in the passionate parts of the poem; but it is deficient throughout in that finished elegance of style which distinguishes the works of the great artist from whom it is imitated. Bertram, a peasant-born poet falls in love with the Lady Geraldine, a woman of high rank and very extensive possessions. He happens to overhear the lady address the following words to a suitor of the same rank with herself, and whose overtures she is declining—
"Yes, your lordship judges rightly. Whom I marry, shall be noble,
Ay, and wealthy. I shall never blush to think how he was born."