Page:Men of Letters, Scott, 1916.djvu/312

286 286 THE FIRST MORRIS trooping of palpable words. "See my breast rise," cries the Queen — ' ' Like waves of purple sea as here I stand, And how my hands are moved in wonderful wise. Yea also, at my full heart's strong command, See through my long throat how the words go up In ripples to Tny mouth." He must measure the passage of time in terms of blossoms and primary earthly appearances before he feels it is comprehensibly registered, working it out on a primitive dial. To say — Until the leaves, Grown big upon the bushes of the walk East of the Palace-plesaunce, make it hard To see the minster therefrom, is his laborious way of indicating an interval. Objects that might have seemed solid enough already he must make still more tangible. When he borrows, from a picture of Rossetti's, that stricken gesture of fingers pressed to face, of which the painter was so fond, and bestows it upon Guenevere — Her hand close to her mouth touching her cheek — he must make it yet more physical, adding : — As though she had had there a shameful blow^ confirming the bodily act, not by showing us its governing emotion, but with a picture of a second action, heavier and grosser and more violent than the first. And more than once, when he copies a painted image of the Christ to embody the idea of divinity, he must carry even this solidification a strange stage