Page:Adams - Essays in Modernity.djvu/50

38 maybe, he will also envisage what will still for a while remain a whole. There he will find the one figure of larger mould which the poet all but succeeded in animating, a woman's; and he will muse on the parallel of Virgil's 'Dido,' dwelling on the one piece of splendid blank verse, verse as apulse with dramatic power and passion as the dying Phœnician's, which flames and shrills on Ida's lips, denouncing the male intruders on 'her female field.' Then, too, perhaps he will have some haunting sense of the contemporary and personal applicability of Joubert's criticism on Racine as 'le Virgile des ignorants'—'the Virgil of the ill-educated.'

Yet he will find passages of real stateliness:

We give you welcome—not without redound Of use and glory to yourselves ye come, The firstfruits of the stranger—after-time And that full voice which circles round the grave Will rank you nobly mingled up with me.' Little enough of blank verse of this quality has been written in our time, and there are parts of 'The Passing of Arthur' which strike a note still higher. 'Why not a summer's as a winter's tale?' this favoured scion of the new century may ask, unaware that the decision lies not with himself, but with his still more favoured descendant, to whom the whole subject-matter of 'The Princess' may seem but the