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There is something well-nigh intolerable in the verisimilitude of the poem, in its frightful arraignment of this "venomous spirit" who broods over the world of Nature and art, tormenting the land of dreams, blackening the face of spring and youth and life itself. The lines would be almost sinister were it not for the splendid courage of those final stanzas:—

The man who wrote those lines felt, indeed; but upon his lips lay the seal of culture and of temperamental repression. This was the veil of his heart's inner sanctuary—that "Precept of Silence" which one of his most characteristic poems has immortalised: