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Rh contains so much poor stuff. It is by such felicities as the climax—

that the form of every lyric should be a discovery.

The surprise of this kind that seems to have fallen most directly out of heaven is the line—

from the dirge in Twelfth Night.

The difficulty of accounting for the scansion of that disquieted Shakespearean editors for upwards of two hundred years, till at last it was observed that the irregularity was exceedingly beautiful. So easily is the goal of æsthetic research obscured even for men as intelligent as Pope or Capel.

Now, for fear of enervating our taste by an over-constant effort to appreciate what is perfect, let us compare a stanza from the great lyric in Matthew Arnold's Empedocles, and one from Browning's much-vaunted Rabbi Ben Ezra, with one from Shelley's To a Skylark. 136