"Lo! as a dove, when up she springs Like her I go: I cannot stay; I leave this mortal ark behind, O'er ocean mirrors rounded large, And reach the glow of southern skies, And linger weeping on the marge, And saying: 'Comes he thus, my friend? Whilst this melancholy ship is on her voyage the poet's thoughts are with her on her track. But there seems to us some unreality in the "fancies which aver," whether the day is calm or stormy, "That all thy motions gently pass Athwart a plane of molten glass." The pathos of this picture of the calm day, the calm sea, and the calm dead, cannot be exceeded. How wonderfully is the stillness, and the very air and feeling of an autumn morning, made present to us by the image of the falling chesnut! "Calm is the morn without a sound, Calm as to suit a calmer grief, And only through the faded leaf The chesnut pattering to the ground: Calm and deep peace on this high wold, And on these dews that drench the furze, That twinkle into green and gold: Calm and still light on yon great plain Calm and deep peace in this wide air, Calm on the seas, and silver sleep, And waves that sway themselves in rest, Which heaves but with the heaving deep."-P. 17. There are many confessions throughout the volume that it is not the true expression of the poet's grief, but rather a mechanical attempt to relieve it, to deaden the bitterness of the heart-sorrow by calling in all the powers of the intellect, and even that skill which deals with the artificial structure of verse, to bear a part of the burden and take the strain off the affections. There are times when though faithful nature could not bear another task or another contemplation, it yet need not sit vacant and passive under the weight of woe, and the spirit can now exert itself on the calamity that before crushed it. Still we must confess that, even on this hypothesis, there is in this volume too much of the luxury of woe, too much of a fond and wilful dwelling on its circumstance, and too little of the holy and peaceable fruits to the heart that is exercised thereby. We have indeed the distinct statement that he writes not to utter his grief, but to divert the mind from the sense of pain.. "I sometimes hold it half a sin To put in words the grief I feel; But, for the unquiet heart and brain, In words, like weeds, I'll wrap me o'er, In another place, he says that his spirit can find relief in words only when the tides of his grief are not full. This he illustrates by some exquisite imagery. His friend, it would appear, lies buried by the banks of the Wye, which murmurs past his grave; but it is silenced, like his more tranquil sorrow, when the waves of the mighty deep rush in and overwhelm it. Each audibly trickles again, only when the swelling waters have subsided. For the full enjoyment of the poem we have only to remember that his friend died at Vienna. "The Danube to the Severn gave The darken'd heart that beat no more; And in the hearing of the wave. There twice a-day the Severn fills, The Wye is hush'd nor moved along; The tide flows down, the wave again Is vocal in its wooded walls: My deeper anguish also falls, And I can speak a little then."-P. 32. The same feeling is expressed under very different, but not less perfect, Imagery, in the next poem. "The lesser griefs that may be said, That breathe a thousand tender vows, Are but as servants in a house, Where lies the master newly dead; Who speak their feeling as it is, And weep the fulness from the mind: My lighter moods are like to these, For by the hearth the children sit, But open converse is there none, So much the vital spirits sink To see the vacant chair, and think, 'How good! how kind! and he is gone." "-P. 34. Sometimes indeed there seems a resoluteness in his mourning, a retention of it by the will. "Still onward winds the dreary way; I with it; for I long to prove No lapse of moons can canker Love, But this is always accompanied by a protest, that these flying shades of the inner darkness must not be mistaken for the realities of the unspoken agony. "If these brief lays, of Sorrow born, Grave doubts and answers here proposed, Her care is not to part and prove; She takes, when harsher moods remit, And hence, indeed, she sports with words; Nor dare she trust a larger lay, But rather loosens from the lip, Short swallow-flights of song, that dip Their wings in tears, and skim away."-P. 70. He is conscious that he will be upbraided for a selfish indulgence in the luxury of woe;-and his defence is not of a very spiritual order; he must yield to the instincts of feeling, and obey nature like the birds. One plea he puts in, in mitigation of judgment on his abandonment to his mood, which it will be well to regard,-that only those should be his judges who have shared his experience and know his case. "I sing to him who rests below, And since the grasses round me wave, Another answers, 'Let him be, He loves to make parade of pain, For private sorrow's barren song, 'A time to sicken and to swoon, When science reaches forth her arms To feel from world to world, and charms Behold, ye speak an idle thing: Ye never knew the sacred dust: And unto one her note is gay, For now her little ones have ranged; |