"The famous orators have shone, The famous poets sung and gone,"
and so on for nearly half a score of lines! How perfect the sad contrast of the refrain--
"_Ah! so the quiet was! So was the hush!_"
how justly set and felicitously worded the rural picture of the opening! how riotous the famous irruption of the New Agers! how adequate the quiet-moral of the end, that the Past is as the Present, and more also! And then he went and wrote about Bottles!
"The master stood upon the mount and taught-- He saw a fire in his disciples' eyes,"--
conducts us to two other fine, though rhymeless, dirges. In the first, _Rugby Chapel_, the intensity of feeling is sufficient to carry off the lack of lyrical accomplishment. The other is the still better _Heine's Grave_, and contains the famous and slightly pusillanimous lines about the "weary Titan," which are among the best known of their author's, and form at once the motto and the stigma of mid-century Liberal policy. And then the book is concluded by two other elegies--in rhyme this time--_The Stanzas written at the Grande Chartreuse_ and _Obermann once more_. They are, however, elegies of a different kind, much more self-centred, and, indeed, little more than fresh variations on "the note," as I ventured to call it before. Their descriptive and autobiographic interest is great, and if poetry were a criticism of life, there is plenty of that of them. The third book--_Schools and Universities on the Continent_ (1868)--in which are put the complete results of the second Continental exploration--is, I suppose, much less known than the non-professional work, though perhaps not quite so unknown as the earlier report on elementary education. By far the larger part of it--the whole, indeed, except a "General Conclusion" of some forty pages--is a reasoned account of the actual state of matters in France, Italy, Germany, and Switzerland. It is not exactly judicial; for the conclusion--perhaps the foregone conclusion--obviously colours every page. But it is an excellent example (as, indeed, is all its author's non-popular writing) of clear and orderly exposition--never arranged _ad captandum_, but also never "dry." Indeed there certainly are some tastes, and there may be many, to which the style is a distinct relief after the less quiet and more mannered graces of some of the rest.