"
He lifts everything, not beyond recognition, but to an ideal distance
where no mortal, I had almost said human, fleck is visible. Instead of
the ordinary bridal gifts, he hallows his wife with an Epithalamion fit
for a conscious goddess, and the "savage soil"[315] of Ireland becomes a
turf of Arcady under her feet, where the merchants' daughters of the town
are no more at home than the angels and the fair shapes of pagan
mythology whom they meet there. He seems to have had a common-sense side
to him, and could look at things (if we may judge by his tract on Irish
affairs) in a practical and even hard way; but the moment he turned
toward poetry he fulfilled the condition which his teacher Plato imposes
on poets, and had not a particle of prosaic understanding left. His
fancy, habitually moving about in worlds not realized, unrealizes
everything at a touch. The critics blame him because in his Prothalamion
the subjects of it enter on the Thames as swans and leave it at Temple
Gardens as noble damsels; but to those who are grown familiar with his
imaginary world such a transformation seems as natural as in the old
legend of the Knight of the Swan.
"Come now ye damsels, daughters of Delight,
Help quickly her to dight:
But first come ye, fair Hours, which were begot
In Jove's sweet paradise of Day and Night, .
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