235. Felicia D. Hemans, 1793-1835. (Handbook, par. 235.)
One of the most popular of our poetesses, especially in America. Her chivalric poems show great richness of imagery and all combine delicacy of feeling with harmony and brilliance of language. Scott complained that there was more flower than fruit. Among her longer pieces are The Forest Sanctuary, Records of Woman, etc. Her minor poems however are the more popular.
What household thoughts around thee, as their shrine,
Cling reverently !-Of anxious looks beguiled,
My mother's eyes, upon thy page divine,
Each day were bent-her accents gravely mild,
Breathed out thy love: whilst I, a dreamy child,
Wandered on breeze-like fancies oft away,
To some lone tuft of gleaming spring-flowers wild,
Some fresh-discovered nook for woodland play,
Some secret nest: yet would the solemn Word
At times, with kindlings of young wonder heard,
Fall on my wakened spirit, there to be
A seed not lost :-for which, in darker years,
O Book of Heaven! I pour, with grateful tears,
Heart blessings on the holy dead and thee!
'I hear thee speak of a better land;
Thou callest its children a happy band;
Mother! O where is that radiant shore?
Shall we not seek it and weep no more?
Is it where the flower of the orange blows,
And the fireflies glance through the myrtle boughs?
'Not there, not there, my child!'
Is it where the feathery palm-trees rise,
And the date grows ripe under sunny skies?
Or 'midst the green islands of glittering seas,
Where fragrant forests perfume the breeze;
And strange, bright birds on their starry wings
Bear the rich hues of all glorious things?'
'Not there, not there, my child !'
'Eye hath not seen it, my gentle boy!
Ear hath not heard its deep songs of joy;
Dreams cannot picture a world so fair-
Sorrow and death may not enter there;
Time doth not breathe on its fadeless bloom,
For beyond the clouds and beyond the tomb-
It is there, it is there, my child!'
The Song of Night.
I come to thee, O Earth!
With all my gifts;-for every flower, sweet dew,
In bell and urn and chalice, to renew
The glory of its birth...
I come with peace; I shed
Sleep through thy wood-walks o'er the honey-bee,
The lark's triumphant voice, the fawn's young glee,
The hyacinth's meek head.
On my own heart I lay
The weary babe, and sealing with a breath
Its eyes of love, send fairy dreams beneath
The shadowing lids to play.
I come with mightier things!
Who calls me silent? I have many tones;
The dark skies thrill with low mysterious moans
Borne on my sweeping wings.
The stately Homes of England,
How beautiful they stand!
Amidst their tall ancestral trees
O'er all the pleasant land.
The Homes of England.
I come, I come; ye have called me long;
I come o'er the mountains with light and song.
Ay, call it hely ground,
The soil where first they trod,
They have left unstained what here they found
Freedom to worship God.
The Landing of the Pilgrim Futhers.
236. John Keats, 1795-1821. (Handbook, par. 229.)
Ode on a Grecian Urn.
Thou still unravished bride of quietness,
Thou foster-child of silence and slow time,
Sylvan historian, who canst thus express
A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme:
What leaf-fringed legend haunts about thy shape
Of deities or mortals, or of both,
In Tempe or the dales of Arcady?
What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?
What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?
What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?
Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;
Not to the sensual ear, but, more endeared,
Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone:
Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave
Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare;
Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss,
Though winning near the goal-yet, do not grieve;
She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,
For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair! ...
O Attic shape! Fair attitude! with brede
Of marble men and maidens overwrought,
With forest branches and the trodden weed;
Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought
As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral!
When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st, • Beauty is truth, truth beauty,'-that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know. Out of five stanzas.
O Moon! the oldest shades 'mong oldest trees
Feel palpitations when thou lookest in:
O Moon! old boughs lisp forth a holier din
The while they feel thine airy fellowship.
Thou dost bless everywhere, with silver lip
Kissing dead things to life. The sleeping kine,
Couched in thy brightness, dream of fields divine:
Innumerable mountains rise, and rise,
Ambitious for the hallowing of thine eyes
And yet thy benediction passeth not
One obscure hiding-place, one little spot
Where pleasure may be sent: the nested wren
Has thy fair face within its tranquil ken,
And from beneath a sheltering ivy leaf
Takes glimpses of thee. The mighty deeps,
The monstrous sea is thine-the myriad sea.
A thing of beauty is a joy for ever;
Its loveliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness.
There is a roaring in the bleak-grown pines
When Winter lifts his voice; there is a noise
Among immortals when a God gives sign,
With hushing finger, how he means to load
His tongue with the full weight of utterless thought,
With thunder, and with music, and with pomp:
Such noise is like the roar of bleak-grown pines;
Which, when it ceases in this mountained world,
No other sound succeeds; but ceasing here,
Among these fallen, Saturn's voice therefrom
Grew up like organ, that begins anew
Its strain, when other harmonies, stopt short,
Leave the dinned air vibrating silverly.
Thus grew it up-'Not in my own sad breast,
Which is its own great judge and searcher out,
Can I find reason why ye should be thus:
Not in the legends of the first of days,
Studied from that old spirit-leaved book
Which starry Uranus with finger bright
Saved from the shores of darkness, when the waves
Low-ebbed still hid it up in shallow gloom;
And the which book ye know I ever kept
For my firm-based footstool.
No, nowhere can unriddle, though I search,
And pore on Nature's universal scroll
Even to swooning, why ye, Divinities,
The first-born of all shaped and palpable Gods,
Should cower beneath what, in comparison,
Is untremendous might.'
Those green-robed senators of mighty woods,
Tall oaks, branch-charmed by the earnest stars,
Dream, and so dream all night without a stir.
237. Thomas Hood, 1798-1845. (Handbook, par. 230.)
With fingers weary and worn,
With eyelids heavy and red,
A woman sat in unwomanly rags,
Plying her needle and thread-
Stitch, stitch, stitch,
In poverty, hunger, and dirt,
And still with a voice of
She sang the 'Song of the Shirt'!
Oh men with sisters dear!
Oh men with mothers and
wives!
It is not linen you're wearing out,
But human creatures' lives!
Stitch, stitch, stitch,
In poverty, hunger, and dirt,
Sewing at once with a double
thread
A shroud as well as a shirt.
Work, work, work,
My labour never flags; And what are its wages? a bed of straw,
A crust of bread-and rags. That shattered roof-and this naked floor
A table-a broken chairAnd a wall so blank my shadow I thank
For sometimes falling there.
Oh! but to breathe the breath
Of the cowslip and primrose sweet, With the sky above my head,
And the grass beneath my feet.
For only one short hour
To feel as I used to feel,
Before I knew the woes of want,
And the walk that costs a meal!
Out of eleven stanzas.
• The selections from Hood are the copyright of Messrs. Moxon and Co.
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