The rest of the ragman's gatherings, with three most notable
exceptions, is little better for the most part than dry rubbish or
disgusting refuse; unless a plea may haply be put in for the pretty
commonplaces of the lines on a "sweet rose, fair flower," and so forth;
for the couple of thin and pallid if tender and tolerable copies of verse
on "Beauty" and "Good Night," or the passably light and lively stray of
song on "crabbed age and youth." I need not say that those three
exceptions are the stolen and garbled work of Marlowe and of Barnfield,
our elder Shelley and our first-born Keats; the singer of Cynthia in
verse well worthy of Endymion, who would seem to have died as a poet in
the same fatal year of his age that Keats died as a man; the first
adequate English laureate of the nightingale, to be supplanted or
equalled by none until the advent of his mightier brother.
II.
The second period is that of perfection in comic and historic style. The
final heights and depths of tragedy, with all its reach of thought and
all its pulse of passion, are yet to be scaled and sounded; but to this
stage belongs the special quality of faultless, joyous, facile command
upon each faculty required of the presiding genius for service or for
sport.
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