Sadness

I Dreamed that one had died in a strange place
Near no accustomed hand,
And they had nailed the boards above her face,
The peasants of that land,
Wondering to lay her in that solitude,
And raised above her mound
A cross they had made out of two bits of wood,
And planted cypress round;
And left her to the indifferent stars above
Until I carved these words:
I(She was more beautiful than thy first love,)
I(But now lies under boards.)

Among the fields the camomile
Seems blown steam in the lightning's glare.
Unusual odors drench the air.
Night speaks above; the angry smile
Of storm within her stare.

The way for me to-night? To-night,
Is through the wood whose branches fill
The road with dripping rain-drops. Till,
Between the boughs, a star-like light
Our home upon the hill.

The path for me to take? It goes
Around a trailer-tangled rock,
'Mid puckered pink and hollyhock,
Unto a latch-gate's unkempt rose,
And door whereat I knock.

Bright on the old-time flower-place
The lamp streams through the foggy pane.
The door is opened to the rain;
And in the door, her happy face,
And eager hands again.

How like a winter hath my absence been
From thee, the pleasure of the fleeting year!
What freezings have I felt, what dark days seen!
What old December’s bareness everywhere!
And yet this time removed was summer’s time;
The teeming autumn, big with rich increase,
Bearing the wanton burden of the prime,
Like widow’d wombs after their lords’ decease:
Yet this abundant issue seem’d to me
But hope of orphans, and unfather’d fruit;
For summer and his pleasures wait on thee,
And, thou away, the very birds are mute:
Or, if they sing, ’tis with so dull a cheer,
That leaves look pale, dreading the winter’s near.

May has come from out the showers,
Sun and splendor in her train.
All the grasses and the flowers
Waken up to life again.
Once again the leaves do show,
And the meadow blossoms blow,
Once again through hills and dales
Rise the songs of nightingales.

Wheresoe'er on field or hillside
With her paint-brush Spring is seen,--
In the valley, by the rillside,
All the earth is decked with green.
Once again the sun beguiles
Moves the drowsy world to smiles.
See! the sun, with mother-kiss
Wakes her child to joy and bliss.

Now each human feeling presses
Flow'r like, upward to the sun,
Softly, through the heart's recesses,
Steal sweet fancies, one by one.
Golden dreams, their wings outshaking,
Now are making
Realms celestial,
...

Different Attitudes in which Authors compose.--Bayes, Henry Stevens, Herodotus, etc.--Writing in Bed--in the Fields.--Plato and Sir Richard Blackmore.--Fiddling with Gloves and Twigs.--Madame de Staël.--Rhyming on the Road, in an old Calêche.


What various attitudes and ways
    And tricks we authors have in writing!
While some write sitting, some like BAYES
    Usually stand while they're inditing,
Poets there are who wear the floor out,
    Measuring a line at every stride;
While some like HENRY STEPHENS pour out
    Rhymes by the dozen while they ride.
HERODOTUS wrote most in bed;
    And RICHERAND, a French physician,
Declares the clock-work of the head
    Goes best in that reclined position.
If you consult MONTAIGNE and PLINY on
The subject, 'tis...

    The three following Sonnets are written in the character of Werter; the sentiments and images chiefly, but not intirely taken from one of his letters.

Up this bleak Hill, in wintry Night's dread hour,
    With mind congenial to the scene, I come!
    To see my Valley in the lunar gloom,
    To see it whelm'd. - Amid the cloudy lour
Gleams the cold Moon; - and shows the ruthless power
    Of yon swoln Floods, that white with turbid foam
    Roll o'er the fields; - and, billowy as they roam,
    Against the bushes beat! - A Vale no more,
A troubled Sea, toss'd by the furious Wind! -
    Alas! the wild and angry Waves efface
    Pathway, and hedge, and bank, and stile! - I find
But one wide waste of waters! - In controul
    Thus dire, to tides of Misery...

I.

Three months bade wane and wax the wintering moon
Between two dates of death, while men were fain
Yet of the living light that all too soon
Three months bade wane.

Cold autumn, wan with wrath of wind and rain,
Saw pass a soul sweet as the sovereign tune
That death smote silent when he smote again.

First went my friend, in life's mid light of noon,
Who loved the lord of music:    then the strain
Whence earth was kindled like as heaven in June
Three months bade wane.

II.

A herald soul before its master's flying
Touched by some few moons first the darkling goal
Where shades rose up to greet the shade, espying
A herald soul;

Shades of dead lords of music, who control
Men living by the might of men undying,
With...

This ugly old crone -
Every beauty she had
When a maid, when a maid.
Her beautiful eyes,
Too youthful, too wise,
Seemed ever to come
To so lightless a home,
Cold and dull as a stone.
And her cheeks - who would guess
Cheeks cadaverous as this
Once with colours were gay
As the flower on its spray?
Who would ever believe
Aught could bring one to grieve
So much as to make
Lips bent for love's sake
So thin and so grey?
O Youth, come away!
As she asks in her lone,
This old, desolate crone.
She loves us no more;
She is too old to care
For the charms that of yore
Made her body so fair.
Past repining, past care,
She lives but to bear
One or two fleeting years
Earth's indifference: her tears
Have lost now their...

We must get home! How could we stray like this? -
So far from home, we know not where it is, -
Only in some fair, apple-blossomy place
Of children's faces - and the mother's face -
We dimly dream it, till the vision clears
Even in the eyes of fancy, glad with tears.

We must get home - for we have been away
So long, it seems forever and a day!
And O so very homesick we have grown,
The laughter of the world is like a moan
In our tired hearing, and its song as vain, -
We must get home - we must get home again!

We must get home! With heart and soul we yearn
To find the long-lost pathway, and return!...
The child's shout lifted from the questing band
Of old folk, faring weary, hand in hand,
But faces brightening, as if clouds at last
Were showering...

Passa la nave mia colma d' oblio.

UNDER THE FIGURE OF A TEMPEST-TOSSED VESSEL, HE DESCRIBES HIS OWN SAD STATE.


    My bark, deep laden with oblivion, rides
O'er boisterous waves, through winter's midnight gloom,
'Twixt Scylla and Charybdis, while, in room
Of pilot, Love, mine enemy, presides;
At every oar a guilty fancy bides,
Holding at nought the tempest and the tomb;
A moist eternal wind the sails consume,
Of sighs, of hopes, and of desire besides.
A shower of tears, a fog of chill disdain
Bathes and relaxes the o'er-wearied cords,
With error and with ignorance entwined;
My two loved lights their wonted aid restrain;
Reason or Art, storm-quell'd, no help affords,
Nor hope remains the wish'd-for port to find.

CHARLEMONT.
<...

The number of the vanish'd years
    That mark each famous Grecian reign,
This night, my Telephus, appears
    Thy solemn pleasure to explain;

Or else assiduously to dwell,
    In conscious eloquence elate,
On those who conquer'd, those who fell
    At sacred Troy's devoted gate.

But at what price the cask, so rare,
    Of luscious chian may be ours,
Who shall the tepid baths prepare,
    And who shall strew the blooming flowers;

Beneath what roof we next salute,
    And when shall smile these gloomy skies,
Thy wondrous eloquence is mute,
    Nor here may graver topics rise. -

Fill a bright bumper, - to the Moon!
    She's new! - auspicious be her birth!
One to the Midnight! - 't is our noon
    Of jocund thought, and fes...

    Sweet, sweet days are passing
    O'er my happy home.
    Passing on swift wings through the valley of life.
    Cold are the days when winter comes again.
    When my sweet days were passing at my happy home,
    Sweet were the days on the rivulet's green brink ;
    Sweet were the days when I read my father's books;
    Sweet were the winter days when bright fires are blazing."

I stood upon a crowded thoroughfare,
Within a city's confines, where were met
All classes and conditions, and surveyed,
From a secluded niche or aperture,
The various, ever-changing multitude
Which passed along in restless turbulence,
And, as a human river, ebbed and flowed
Within its banks of brick and masonry.

Within this vast and heterogeneous throng,
One might discern all stages and degrees,
From wealth and power to helpless indigence;
Extravagance to trenchant penury,
And all extremes of want and misery.
Some blest by wealth, some cursed by poverty;
Some in positions neutral to them both;
Some wore a gaunt and ill-conditioned look
Which told its tale of lack of nourishment;
While others showed that irritated air
Which speaks of gout and pa...

I saw her twins of eyelids listless swoon
    Mesmeric eyes,
Like the mild lapsing of a lulling tune
    On wide surprise,
While slow the graceful presence of a moon
    Mellowed the purple skies.

And had she dreamed or had in fancy gone
    As one who sought
To hail the influx of a godly dawn
    Of heavenly thought,
Trod trembling o'er old sainted hill and lawn
    With intense angels fraught?

Sailed thro' majestic domes of the deep night
    By isles of stars,
Wand'ring like some pure blessing warm with light
    From worldly jars
To the high halls of morning, pearly white,
    And heaped with golden bars.

Past temples vast, deluged with sandy seas,
    Whose ruins stand
Like bleaching bones of dead monstrosities
 ...

In days of yore, while yet the world was new,
And all around was beautiful to view
When spring or summer ruled the happy hours,
And golden fruit hung down mid opening flowers;
When, if you chanced among the woods to stray,
The rosy-footed dryad led the way,
Or if, beside a mountain brook, your path,
You ever caught some naïad at her bath:
'Twas in that golden day, that Damon strayed.
Musing, alone, along a Grecian glade.
Retired the scene, yet in the morning light,
Athens in view, shone glimmering to the sight.
'Twas far away, yet painted on the skies,
It seemed a marble cloud of glorious dyes,
Where yet the rosy morn, with lingering ray,
Loved on the sapphire pediments to play.
But why did Damon heed the _distant_ scene?
For he was young, and all around ...

The harp of the minstrel has never a tone
    As sad as the song in his bosom to-night,
For the magical touch of his fingers alone
    Can not waken the echoes that breathe it aright;
But oh! as the smile of the moon may impart
    A sorrow to one in an alien clime,
Let the light of the melody fall on the heart,
    And cadence his grief into musical rhyme.

The faces have faded, the eyes have grown dim
    That once were his passionate love and his pride;
And alas! all the smiles that once blossomed for him
    Have fallen away as the flowers have died.
The hands that entwined him the laureate's wreath
    And crowned him with fame in the long, long ago,
Like the laurels are withered and folded beneath
    The grass and the stubble - the frost and the snow.

Oh, unforgotten and only lover,
Many years have swept us apart,
But none of the long dividing seasons
Slay your memory in my heart.
In the clash and clamour of things unlovely
My thoughts drift back to the times that were,
When I, possessing thy pale perfection,
Kissed the eyes and caressed the hair.

Other passions and loves have drifted
Over this wandering, restless soul,
Rudderless, chartless, floating always
With some new current of chance control.
But thine image is clear in the whirling waters -
Ah, forgive - that I drag it there,
For it is so part of my very being
That where I wander it too must fare.

Ah, I have given thee strange companions,
To thee - so slender and chaste and cool -
But a white star loses no glimmer of beauty

Indeed, my Phaedra, if to find
That wealth can female wishes gain
Had e'er disturb'd your thoughtful mind,
Or cost one serious moment's pain,
I should have said that all the rules,
You learn'd of moralists and schools,
Were very useless, very vain.

Yet I perhaps mistake the case,
Say, though with this heroic air,
Like one that holds a nobler chace,
You try the tender loss to bear,
Does not your heart renounce your tongue?
Seems not my censure strangely wrong
To count it such a slight affair?
When Hesper gilds the shaded sky,
Oft as you seek the well-known grove,
Methinks I see you cast your eye
Back to the morning scenes of love:
Each pleasing word you heard her say,
Her gentle look, her graceful way,
Again your struggling fancy move....