Wax faint o'er the gardens of Gul in their bloom?
Where the citron and olive are fairest of fruit
And the voice of the nightingale never is mute-
Where the virgins are soft as the roses they twine,
And all save the spirit of man is divine?
'Tis the land of the East- 'tis the clime of the Sun-
Can he smile on such deeds as his children have done?
Oh, wild as the accents of lovers' farewell
Are the hearts that they bear and the tales that they tell.
Now the flow of these lines (as times go) is very sweet and musical.
They have been often admired, and justly- as times go- that is to say,
it is a rare thing to find better versification of its kind. And where
verse is pleasant to the ear, it is silly to find fault with it
because it refuses to be scanned. Yet I have heard men, professing
to be scholars, who made no scruple of abusing these lines of
Byron's on the ground that they were musical in spite of all law.
Other gentlemen, not scholars, abused "all law" for the same reason-
and it occurred neither to the one party nor to the other that the law
about which they were disputing might possibly be no law at all- an
ass of a law in the skin of a lion.
The Grammars said nothing about dactylic lines, and it was easily
seen that these lines were at least meant for dactylic.
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