Page:The New Monthly Magazine - Volume 096.djvu/159

Rh Oxford man to be indifferent to the mysteries of that pregnant dialect. One would vastly relish a translation by his pen, when he was in the vein, of one or two of the comedies of Aristophanes—especially if enriched with such notes and excursus and appendices as he could so easily furnish. His acquirements in the altitudes of scholarship in its classic phase, and in the eccentric phraseology consecrated to the fancy and the ring, to Newmarket and Billingsgate, would there find ample room and verge enough for a brilliant conjunction. Perhaps, however, on the whole, his writings would not be less widely or durably welcome, were he to turn the pruning-knife against the sometimes rank luxuriance of slang. Graphic and telling as it is, it is not the sort of thing for genius to canonize with the formula quod semper, quod ubique—although so neatly handled as to prevent the possibility of a quod ab omnibus.

on the chill night air,

Like the sea-weed on the sea,

Unconfined her amber hair, And her light vest floated free;

Like the white dove by the blast

O'er the raging billows borne,

Driven upward, downward cast,

With her soft breast stained and torn,

Buffeted and beaten back,

Yet returning on the track.

So that poor soul through the night

Wandered o'er the plain and height;

As the spirit-bands passed by,

Hailing them with anxious cry,

"Have yo heard upon the wild,

Wailing low, my little child?