A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century Part 28

O'Shaughnessy's metrical originality is undoubted. But one of his finest lyrics, "The Fountain of Tears," has an echo of Baudelaire's American master, Edgar Poe, as well as of Swinburne;

"Very peaceful the place is, and solely For piteous lamenting and sighing, And those who come living or dying Alike from their hopes and their fears: Full of cypress-like shadows the place is, And statues that cover their faces; But out of the gloom springs the holy And beautiful Fountain of Tears."

[51] See especially "Sir Erwin's Questing," "The Ballad of May Margaret,"

"The Westward Sailing," and "The Ballad of the King's Daughter" in "Songs of Life and Death."

[52] In "An Epic of Women."

[53] "From time to time bright spirits, intolerant of the traditional, try to alter the bournes of time and s.p.a.ce in these respects, and to make out that the cla.s.sical, whatever the failings on its part, was always in its heart rather Romantic, and that the Romantic has always, at its best, been just a little cla.s.sical. . . . But such observations are only of use as guards against a too wooden and matter-of-fact cla.s.sification; the great general differences of the periods remain, and can never be removed in imagination without loss and confusion" ("A Short History of English Literature," Saintsbury, p. 724).

[54] _Vide supra_, pp. 123-25.

[55] "A Dialogue to the Memory of Mr. Alexander Pope."

THE END.