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1864.
PUBLISHERS’ NOTICE.
HE brief tragedy of poor David Gray, as
unveiled in this volume, cannot fail to make
a lasting impression on every unhardened reader.
The poems of this ill-fated and winsome young
Scotchman, heart-brother of Robert Burns, are
marked by rare tenderness and sincerity, and by
that fascinating ‘felicity of verbal touch which is
one of the choicest characteristics of true genius.
Such a pure and_ pathetic story, such lucid and
breathing poetry as we have here, are charged
with a blessed ministry for a coarse and bustling
age, for a reckless utilitarian people. The feelings
of love, pity, and grief this little book is calculated |
to awaken will exert a salutary influence, soften-
ing the heart, nourishing human sympathy and
| poetic sentiment. And the publishers are confi-
dent that every appreciative reader of the volume,
iv PUBLISHERS’ NOTICE.
while sighing over the plaintive fate of the author, —
will gladly aid in securing for him, on this West-
ern continent, that meed of love and fame which
just gleamed before his dying vision in the let-
ters of generous friends and the first proof-sheet
of his darling “ Luaers.”’
The publishers take pleasure in saying, that a
generous portion of any profits which may accrue
from the sale of this volume shall be sent to the
parents of David Gray, who still reside in Merk-
land, on the banks of the stream their gifted son
has made famous.
od
map tei
ae)
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& LuccIE
CONTENTS.
popverony Norice, b
EMOTR OF THE “AUTHOR, by James Hedderwick
INAL MEMORIALS
y Lord Houghton (R. M. Milnes) vii
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INTRODUCTORY NOTICE.
TN the spring of 1860 I received a letter signed
I Davin Gray, enclosing some manuscript verses.
The writer stated that he was a Scotchman, who
had had the ordinary education of the artisans of
that country ; that he had written these and other
Poems, and desired my advice as to his coming
up to London and making his way there in the
career of Literature. I was struck with the su-
periority of the verses to almost all the produc-
tions of self-taught men that had been brought
under my observation, and I therefore answered
the letter at some length, recognizing the remark-
able faculty which Mr. Gray seemed to me to pos-
sess ; urging him to cultivate it not exclusively,
nor even especially, but to make it part of his
general culture and intellectual development; and
above all desiring him not to make the peril-
viii INTRODUCTORY NOTICE. —
ous venture of a London literary life, but, at any
rate for some time, to content himself with such
opportunities as he had, and to strive to obtain
some professional independence, however humble,
in which his poetical powers might securely ex-
pand and become the solace of his existence instead
of the precarious purveyor of his daily bread. A
few weeks afterwards I was told a young man
wished to see me, and when he came into the room
I at once saw it could be no other than the young
Scotch Poet. It was a light, well-built, but some-
what stooping figure, with a countenance that at
once brought strongly to my recollection a cast—
of the face of Shelley in his youth, which I had
seen at Mr. Leigh Hunt’s. There was the same
full brow, out-looking eyes, and sensitive, melan-
choly mouth. He told me at once that he had
come to London in consequence of my letter, as _
from the tone of it he was sure I should befriend
him. pianos ole
I was dismayed at this unexpected result of
my advice, and could do no more than press him
to return home as soon as possible. I painted as
darkly as I could the chances and difficulties of a
literary struggle in the crowded competition of
this great city, and how strong a swimmer it re-
INTRODUCTORY NOTICE. ix
fs quired to be not to sink in such a sea of tumultuous
life. ‘“No—he would not return.”’ I determined
in my own mind that he should do so before I
» myself left town for the country, but at the same
time I believed that he might derive advantage
from a short personal experience of hard realities.
He had a confidence in his own powers, a simple
certainty of his own worth, which I saw would
keep him in good heart and preserve him from
base temptations. He refused to take money, say-
ing he had enough to go on with; but I gave‘him
some light literary work, for which he was very
grateful. When he came to me again, I went, over
some of his verse with him, and I shall not forget
the passionate gratification he showed when I told
him that, in my judgment, he was an undeniable
Poet. After this admission he was ready to sub-
mit to my criticism—or correction, though he was
sadly depressed at the rejection of one of his
Poems, over which he had evidently spent much
-labor and care, by the Editor of a distinguished
popular periodical, to whom I had sent it with a
hearty recommendation. His, indeed, was not a
spirit to be seriously injured by a temporary dis-
appointment; but when he fell ill so soon after-
wards, one had something of the feeling of regret
1*
x INTRODUCTORY NOTICE,
that the notorious review of Keats inspires in
connection with the premature loss of the author
of “‘ Endymion.’’
It was only a few weeks after his arrival in
London, that the poor boy came to my house ap-
parently under the influence of violent fever. He
said he had caught cold in the wet weather, hav-
ing been insufficiently protected by clothing ; but
had delayed coming to me for fear of giving me —
unnecessary trouble. I at once sent him back to
his lodgings, which were sufficiently comfortable,
and put him under good medical superintendence.
It soon became apparent that pulmonary disease
had set in, but there were good hopes of arrest-
ing its progress. I visited him often, and every
time with increasing interest. He had somehow
found out that his lungs were affected, and the
image of the destiny of Keats was ever before
him. I leave to his excellent friend Mr. Hedder-
wick to tell the rest of this sad story. I never
saw him after he left London. I much regret
that imperative circumstances did not permit me
to take him under my roof, that I at least might
have the satisfaction of thinking that all human
means of saving his life had been exhausted: for
there was in him the making of a great man.
ee nt
’ ae ere
INTRODUCTORY NOTICE. xi
Wi wee:
His lyrical faculty, astonishing as it was, might
not have outlived the ardor and susceptibilities
of youth ;\ but there was that simple persistence
of character about him, which is so prominent in
the best of his countrymen. I was much struck
with seeing how he had hitherto made the best of
all his scanty opportunities; how he had got all
the good out of the homely virtues of his domestic
life, with no sign of reproach at the plain practical
people about him for not making much of his
poetry and sympathizing with his visions of fame.
These, indeed, must have seemed, to say the least,
intolerably presumptuous to those about him, and
indeed to most of those with whom he came: in
contact. I own I heeded them little. It has
always appeared to me that if a certain brightness
of hope and presumption of genius in young men
who have had all the advantages of the best edu-
cation in their reach, and whose youth has grown
up in careful classical culture, and with the associ-
ations of a refined society, be regarded with a
compassionate interest and feelings no severer than
a gentle ridicule, a far milder condemnation and
deeper sympathy should be given to those who,
without the ordinary processes of mental progress,
without the free interchange of thought, and, above
xii INTRODUCTORY NOTICE. .
all, without the means of weighing their own with
other intelligences) have within themselves the cer-
tain conviction of superiority, and the perceptions
of an interminable vista of Beauty and of Truth.
Such minds feel themselves to be, as it were, ex-
ceptional creatures in the moral world in which
they happened to be placed; and it is as unreason-
able to expect from them a just appreciation of
their own powers, as it would be to require an
accurate notion of distance from a being freshly
gifted with sight. How is he to distinguish the
near and commonplace from the distant and rare?
How is he to know that such have been the thoughts
and such the expressions of thousands before him?
How is he to possess the distinctions of taste and
discriminations of judgment which a long, even
though superficial, literary education confers on
So many undistinguished natures and _ uncritical
minds ? Therefore, when the mere boy who can
write such poems as these in the shadow of death
has talked of being buried in Westminster Abbey,
let not the feeling be other than that which would
meet the aspirations of Stephenson the apprentice,
or Nelson the midshipman.
It-is also significant that a good deal of the over-
confidence which David Gray manifested gave way
a: aaa
ate Ao
INTRODUCTORY NOTICE. xiii
as soon as he knew he was really appreciated and °
cared for. His vanity sang forth, as it were, in
the night of his discouragement, to give himself
fortitude to bear the solitude and the gloom. With
all his admiration of his ‘‘ Luggie,’’ he clearly could
not help in his mind comparing it with the ‘‘Sea-
sons’’; and then he writes, ‘‘ When I read Thom-
son, I despair.’”?” Soon after an almost bombastic
estimate of his own mental progress, he becomes
thoroughly ashamed of himself, and says, ‘‘ that
being bare of all recommendations,” he had “lied
to his own conscience,”’ deeming that ‘‘if he called
himself a great man, others would be bound to
believe him.’”’ Surely this was a spirit to which
knowledge would have given a just humility, and
for which praise and love were especially necessary,
for they would have brought with them modesty
and truth.
I would recommend the readers of these Poems
to keep in mind how deeply they are based on the
few phenomena of nature that came within the
Poet’s observation. He revels in the frost and
snow until the winter of his own sorrow and sick-
ness becomes too hard for him to bear, and then
he only asks for
«One clear day, a snowdrop, and sweet air.”
xiv INTRODUCTORY NOTICE.
The lost illusion of the cuckoo, when it was trans-—
formed into
« A slender bird of modest brown,”
is missed, as something he cannot afford to spare
in his scanty store of natural delights. The ‘‘ Lug-
gie’’ itself ever remains the simple stream that it
really is, and is not decked-out in any fantastic
or inharmonious coloring. He described in a let-
ter to me the rapturous emotions with which the
rich hues and picturesque forms of the coast of
South Devonshire filled his breast; and I believe
that these very feelings would have prolonged
his life, had circumstances permitted him to enjoy
them. .
I will not here assume the position of a poetical
critic, both because I know such Criticism to be
dreary and unsatisfactory, and because I am con-
scious that the personal interest I took in David
Gray is likely in some degree to influence my judg-
ment. There is in truth no critic of poetry but
the man who enjoys it, and the amount of gratifi-
cation felt is the only just measure of criticism.
I believe, however, that I should have found much
pleasure in these Poems if I had met with them
accidentally, and if I had been unaware of the
AES Pee
INTRODUCTORY NOTICE. XV
strange and pathetic incidents of their production.
But the public mind will not separate the intrinsic
merits of the verses from the story of the writer,
-any more than the works and fate of Keats or of
Chatterton ; we value all connected with the being
of every true Poet, because it is the highest form
of nature that man is permitted: to study and
enjoy.
R. M. MILNES,
1 neh se Se RR
“int oN RAP
oo hp
MEMOIR OF THE AUTHOR.
|
T is unusual, I fear, to produce a Memoir of.
if a mere literary aspirant, —of one whose place
~ In the world of letters remains to be ascertained,
-—and concerning whom but little interest can be
felt. Yet, whatever may be the ultimate verdict
on the Poems contained in this volume, there is
something in the short, ambitious, and melancholy
career of their author which may perhaps assist
the reader to judge accurately of their merits.
There are poets of a high, although not perhaps
of the highest order of intellect, whose writings
are a continual reflex of their own inner selves,
—who lay bare their hearts in their works, — and
without some knowledge of whom, in their per-
sonal character and relations,.it would be difi-
cult to form any generous, or even fair estimate
of their productions. ©
7 B
18 MEMOIR OF THE AUTHOR.
Of this intensely subjective class of bards was
Davip Gray, the author of ‘‘ The Luggie, and other
Poems.’ His life, which embraced only his pas-
sionate youth-time, was tremulously, almost mor-
bidly, fanciful. It is necessary to know this, not
in order that his effusions may be judged charitably,
but in order that they may be judged truly. What
might have been weakness or affectation in a mature
man was with him a natural instinct of tenderness.
Had he lived to watch the fate of his book, he
would probably have been as sensitive as Keats
to the shafts of criticism. Consumption, ending
fatally, has saved him from that ordeal. He is
gone where no censure can wound, where no de-
traction can affect him; but a life as strangely
bright and beautiful as it was unhappily brief seems
to suggest a memory that should be guarded by
loving hands.
David Gray was born on the 29th of January,
1838, on the banks of the Luggie, about eight miles
distant from the city of Glasgow. His precise
place of birth was Duntiblae, a little row of houses
on the south side of the stream; but, while he was
a mere child, his parents removed to Merkland, on
the north side, where they still continue to dwell.
All his associations, therefore, clustered about Merk-
MEMOIR OF THE AUTHOR. 19.
land, which is situated within a mile of the town
of Kirkintilloch, on the Gartshore road. It has
neither the dignity of a village nor the primitive
rudeness of a-clachan, but is simply a group of
roadside cottages, some half-dozen in number, hum-
ble, but with slated roofs, having pleasant patches
of garden in front and behind, and wholly oceu-
pied by handloom weavers and their families, who
receive their webs and their inadequate remunera-
tion from the manufacturing warehouses of the
great city. His parents are both living, —an in-
dustrious and exemplary couple, with the constant
click of the shuttle in one division of their cot-
tage, and with doubtless the occasional squall of
juvenile voices in the other. David was the eldest
of eight children, there being four boys and three
girls now left. The Luggie flows past Merkland
at the foot of a precipitous bank, and shortly
afterwards loses itself among the shadows of Ox-
gang, with its fine old mansion-house and rookery,
and debouches at Kirkintilloch into the Kelvin,
one of the tributaries of the Clyde, celebrated in
Scottish song. It is a mere unpretending rivulet,
yet sufficient to turn the wheel of an old meal-mill
at the straggling village of Waterside, a little
way up the stream, though in a lower level of the
20 MEMOIR OF THE AUTHOR.
valley. Neither, except at one or two points, is
it of a character to attract a lover of the pictu-
resque. But although not particularly fitted for a
painter’s eye, it sufficed for a poet’s love. The
little bright-eyed first-born of the Merkland hand-
loom weaver had the more accessible nooks of it’
by heart long before his ambitious feet could carry
him to more beautiful regions; and although, in
later years, he extended the radius of his rambles,
and made intimate acquaintance with the magnifi-
cent glens and cascades in the recesses of the
Campsie fells, his tiny ‘“‘ natal stream,”’ at the foot
of the familiar ‘‘brae,’’ so associated in his heart
with the recollections of childhood and the en-
dearments of home, never lost its freshness or its
charm.
, Other appeals to his imagination were not want-
ing. At a distance of some miles to the north
was the noble outline of the Campsie range; villa-
ges of smoking industry dotted the valley and
plain; to the southwest Glasgow toiled all the
week under its cloud, and consecrated the listen-
ing Sabbath with the faint clang of its bells; while
nightly to the south the country was ablaze, and
the sky reddened, with the numerous blast-furnaces
to which the west of Scotland chiefly owes iis
MEMOIR OF THE AUTHOR. Dit
preponderating wealth. Nor was the locality, in
other respects, deficient in interest. Close to Kirk-
intilloch the Roman invasion had left its tide-
mark in the shape of certain easily distinguishable
remains of the famous wall of Antoninus; there,
too, was the Forth and Clyde Canal, with its leis-
urely craft looking picturesque in the landscape,
as if sitting for artistic effect, or rejoicing in the
land-rest between the Peal of two oceans; while
the occasional rush of some railway train along
its geological groove, — now hidden, -anon revealed,
and soon wholly out of sight, and out of hearing,
—marked the advent of a new and more active
era. All these things the “‘ marvellous boy ”’? must
have daily noted; but still it was mainly the music
of his own little Luggie which murmured melodi-
ously in- his verse, and which he began at length
fondly to dream of linking immortally with his
name.
Perhaps in no other country save Scotland could
‘a lad in Gray’s position—the son of a handloom
weaver, burdened with a large family, and living
in the outlying suburb of a common country town
—have attained the advantage of a classical edu-
cation. His first teacher was Mr. Adams, who
still conducts, with efficiency, the Kirkintilloch
99 MEMOIR OF THE AUTHOR.
parish school. While under this excellent precep-
tor, his literary. bias became strikingly apparent.
Zealous at his tasks, bright with precocious intel-
lect, an unconscionable devourer of books, and
personally ambitious of distinction, it was early in- |
tended that he should devote himself to the office .
of the Christian ministry in connection with the |
Free Church of Scotland, to which his parents
belonged. When about fourteen years of age he
was accordingly sent to Glasgow, where, support-
ing himself to a considerable extent by laborious
tuition, first as pupil-teacher in a public school in
Bridgeton, and afterwards as Queen’s scholar in
the Free Church Normal Seminary, he contrived
to attend the Humanity, Greek, and other classes’
in the University during four successive sessions.
Having likewise obtained some employment as a
private tutor, he found it necessary to add French ~
to his lingual acquisitions. But whatever progress
he may have made in his more severe studies, it
soon became evident. that the bent of his mind
was poetical rather than theological. His imagina-
tion became much more possessed with the beau-
ties of Greek mythology than with the dogmas of
Calvinistic faith. In place of composing sermons,
he betook himself to writing verses. Many of
MEMOIR OF THE AUTHOR. 28
these, bearing the nom de plume of ‘‘ Will Gurney,”’
were published, from time to time, in the columns
of the ‘‘Glasgow Citizen,’?—a journal in which,
some years before, Alexander Smith, the author
of the ‘‘ Life-Drama,”’ had made his first appearance
in print; and abandoning the idea of the pulpit,
and detesting the drudgery of the ferule, the de-
termination seems gradually to have taken root
in his mind of adopting literature as a profession.
His letters at this time betray an extraordinary
and altogether unhealthy degree of excitement, as
of one setting out on some adventurous path, and
uncertain whether he was a genius or a dreamer.
In one of these, addressed to myself, he says:
“This is the third note with which I have at-
tempted to preface the lines I have enclosed. I
know not what to say about them. They are
the faint but true expressions of my imagination,
though deficient — alas! how deficient to symbolize
the beauty of the cloudland I have visited, or the
ideal love of my soul. Perhaps you may deem
- this the raving of a restless spirit, — the spasmodic
mawkishness of a ‘metre-balladmonger’: but do
not, for God’s sake, do not. If you knew how
often I have halted in the middle of the lobby of
your office with a bundle of manuscripts, —if you
24 MEMOIR OF THE AUTHOR. i
knew the wild dreams of literary ambition I am
ever framing, yet all the time conscious of my —
own utter insignificance, my dear sir, you would
pity me.’”’ These hectic sentences, accidentally
preserved, are characteristic of the kind of desper-
ate frenzy with which he was accustomed to com-
pensate for, and avenge, on paper, the shrinking
physical bashfulness of his nature. Shortly after-
wards, when I had met him in society, I fancied
I detected, in the restless yet timid twinkle of
his dark eye, a lack of philosophic balance, a keen
and vivid intellect united with a cértain nervous
incapacity of self-reliance, an irrepressible impulse
to lofty literary enterprise, shaken with maddening
apprehensions of failure.
But neither his circumstances nor his tempera-
ment permitted him to rest. My acquaintance with
him was too slight and casual, irrespectively of
difference of age, to invite or win his confidence.
He had, however, several companions to whom he
had been attracted by kindred sympathies and
tastes, and with whom he often drew glowing and
extravagant pictures of the future, and as often
obliterated them as vain. Among these was Arthur -
Sutherland, a colleague of his own in the Free
Church Normal Seminary, and now a respectable
le ge oe
MEMOIR OF THE AUTHOR. 25
teacher at Maryburgh, near Dingwall. His letters
_ to Sutherland, written early in 1860, when he had
attained the age of twenty-two, are full of fan-
tastic schemes to be undertaken by them jointly,
one of which was to gather what money they
could, meet on a certain day in Edinburgh, make
their way to London on foot, and of course take °
the literary world by storm! These brave and
foolish notions originated, probably in a state of
mind which he confesses. ‘‘ Solitude,’ he says,
‘‘and an utter want of all physical exercise,: are
working deplorable ravages in my nervous sys-
tem. The crow’s-feet are blackening about my
“eyes; and I cannot think to face the sunlight.
When I ponder alone over my own inability to
move the world, —to move one heart in it, —no
wonder that my ‘face gathers blackness.’ Tenny-
son beautifully, and (so far) truly says, that the
face is ‘the form and color of the mind and life.’
If you saw me!’ Another congenial spirit was.
William Freeland, a native of Kirkintilloch, some-
what older in years, and now filling, with honor,
a responsible position in connection with the Glas--
gow press. Many a ramble did he enjoy with
the latter among the scenes of their common boy-
hood, and many a dream did they both dream of.
9 -
26 MEMOIR OF THE AUTHOR.
how greatness was to be attained, and how fame
was to be conquered. In Freeland he found a
prudent, as well as a sympathetic adviser, who
took every opportunity of curbing his too impetu- —
ous enthusiasm, and saving him from immolation
on the critical slights and antagonisms which liter-
ary precocity and assumption are certain to pro-
voke, unless when under the sanctity of a last
illness, or the shelter of a premature grave.
The beginning of 1860 was a feverish and criti-
eal period in the life of ‘our young author. His —
term of service in the Free Normal Seminary had
expired. He was idle, —that is, he was bringing
in no money; and prompted by his parents to find
work, and impelled by his own ambition to seek
fame, his case dilated, in his own eyes, into one
of singular and desperate urgency. But was he
really idle for a day,—for an hour? I venture
to suppose that there were few busier brains and
fingers im existence than his. Only twenty-two!
and yet with sundry languages mastered, with
whole libraries read, and with many a goodly quire
of paper covered with matter which men high in
the world of letters regarded as at least remark-
able for his years! Knowing that unaided he was
powerless for instant action, and that he could.
MEMOIR OF THE AUTHOR. Dy
not afford to wait for the tardy rewards of modest
merit, he seems to have taken to letter-writing on
a large and bold scale, assuming the claims of
genius for the favors which fortune had denied.
He had completed a poem of a thousand lines.
_ Would no one help him to get it published? Writ-
ing to Sutherland, he says, ‘‘I sent to G. H. Lewes,
to Professor Masson, to Professor Aytoun, to Dis-
raeli; but no one will read. it. They swear they
have no time. For my part, I think the poem
will live, and so I care not whether I were drowned
to-morrow.’’ Again he says: ‘‘I spoke to you of
the refusals which had been unfairly given my
poem. Better to have a poem refused than a poem
unwritten.’’ But I have evidence before me that
he received considerate and kindly replies to some,
at least, of his appeals, no doubt blended with
wholesome advice, though, on the whole, most
creditable to the courtesy and generosity of men
having enormous demands on their time, address-
ing a youth, an utter stranger to them, who wrote
as if fancying he had a mission to electrify the
world.
His first influential friend was Mr. Sydney Do-
bell, whose genius as a poet is not greater than
his thorough kindliness as a man. To that gentle-
28 MEMOIR OF THE AUTHOR.
man he introduced himself by means of a short |
note, dated November, 1859. It was addressed.
to him at Cleeve Tower, Cheltenham, and began
as follows :—
“«< First: Cleeve Tower I take to be a pleasant place, clothed
with ivy, and shaded by ancestral beeches: at all events, it is
mightily different from my mother’s home. Let that be under-
stood distinctly.
«Second: I am a poet. Let that also be understood dis-
tinctly.
«“ Third: Having at the present time only 8s. a week, I wish
to improve my position, for the sake of gratifying and assisting
a mother whom I love beyond the conception of the vulgar.
«These, then, are my premises, and the inference takes the
form of this request. Will you,—a poet,—as far as. you can,
assist another, a younger poet (of twenty) in a way not to wound
his feelings, or hurt his independency of spirit ?”
The quaint confidence with which he enclosed
his certificates of character, and asked his influ-
ence, probably excited, in the mind of Mr, Dobell,
a curiosity, if not an interest, regarding the writer.
At all events, a correspondence ensued, at times
very wild and melodramatic on the one side, and
full of stern counsel and substantial kindness on
the other. This correspondence, extending, at
intervals, over the remainder of poor Gray’s life,
MEMOIR OF THE AUTHOR. 29
I have not before me in any complete form. But
from a confusion of documents kindly placed in
my hands, a few: characteristic passages may in
the course of this Memoir be culled. Dobell’s
first answer to Gray does not appear to have been
preserved; but it elicited a pcetical response, of
which the following is the opening passage.
« O, for the vowelled flow of knightly Spenser,
Whose soul rained fragrance, like a golden censer
Chain-swung in Grecian temple, that I might
To your fine soul aread my love aright.
With kind forbearance, birth of native feeling,
A heart of mould celestial revealing, —
You bore the vagaries of one, consuming
His inner spirit with divine illuming ;
You bore the vagaries of one, who dreams, —
What time his spirit, mid the streaky gleams
Of autumn sunset wanders, finding there
Heaven’s ante-chamber, vermeil-flushed, and fair
In feathery purples, fringed with orange-dun, —
The porch of bliss, the threshold of the sun.
O had I known thee when the Auroral birth
Of poesy o’erwhelmed me, and this earth
Became an angel-fingered lyre dim-sounding,
To souls like thine in echoes sweet abounding !
Then would thy presence, brother, have fulfilled
A yearning of my spirit, and instilled
30 MEMOIR OF THE AUTHOR.
An inspiration in me, like a star
Luminous, tremulous, and oracular !
But far away, with all my hopes and fears,
I wrung a blessing from the flowing years,
And nursed what my good God had given me,
The birthright of great souls, — dear poesy.
Now have I found thee, but, dear heart! the golden
Dream to which my soul is so beholden
Is circumscribed and shorn, because I am
A beggar of thy bounty. Is the balm
Of thy dear converse all in this to end,
And shall the beggar never be the FRIEND ?”
We have here, with some imperfections, an audi-
ble echo of the earlier style of Keats, as well as
a sample of the varied means which Gray employed
to wrest from men of distinction, not merely their
recognition, but their friendship. Writing in plain
prose to Mr. Dobell, I find him thus foolishly va-
ticinating: ‘I tell you that, if I live, my name
and fame shall be second to few of any age, and
to none of my own. I speak thus because I feel
power. Nor is this feeling an artificial disease, as
it was in Rousseau, but a feeling which has grown
with me since ever I could think.” That this ex-
travagance must have been promptly and sharply
rebuked, I learn by a subsequent letter from Gray,
‘MEMOIR OF THE AUTHOR. ol
dated December, 1859. ‘You were pretty heavy
on me,” he says, ‘‘and my egotism, as you called
it. If you knew me a little better, and my aims,
and how I have struggled to gain the little knowl-
edge I have, you would account me modest.
Mark: it is not what I have done, or can now do,
but what I feel myself able and born to do, that
makes me seem so selfishly stupid. Yon sentence,
thrown back to me for reconsideration, would cer-
tainly seem strange to anybody but myself; but
the thought that I had so written to you only
made me the more resolute in my actions, and the
wilder in my visions. What if I sent the same
sentence back to you again, with the quiet, stern
answer, that it is my intention to be the ‘first poet
of my own age, and second only to a very few of
any age.’ Would you think me ‘mad,’ ‘drunk,’
or_an ‘idiot’ . or my ‘self-confidence’ one of the
‘saddest paroxysms’? When my biography falls
to be written, will not this same ‘ self-confidence ’
be one of the most striking features of ‘my intel-
lectual development? Might not a‘ poet of twen-
ty’ feel great things? In all the stories of mental
warfare that I have ever read, that mind which
became of celestial clearness and godlike power,
did nothing for twenty years but feel. And I am
32 MEMOIR OF THE AUTHOR.
so accustomed to compare my own mental progress _
with that of such men as Shakespeare, Goethe, and —
Wordsworth, (examples of this last proposition,)
that the dream of my youth will not be fulfilled,
if my fame equal not, at least that of the latter
of these three.’’ In another letter, written in
another mood, he says: ‘‘I am ashamed of what
I wrote to you before. I was an actor then, not
myself: for, being bare of all recommendations, I
lied with my own conscience, deeming that if I
called myself a great man you were bound to be-
lieve me.’’ This sudden and unwonted modesty
was probably the mere expression of a casual fit
of despondency, — entirely sincere while it con--
tinued, yet not more sincere than the arrogance
which it recanted, and which, as the master im-
pulse of his being, was certain to reassert its su-
premacy. However this might be, Mr. Dobell
appears to have become favorably impressed by
the fearless candor of the young enthusiast, as I
find him writing to Gray, who had been talking of
going to Edinburgh, penniless, to try his fortune:
“The tone of your last letter is, to me, a better
evidence that you are born to do something noble
than any number of confident oracles, or any flatu-
lent ‘consciousness of power’ that ever distended
MEMOIR OF THE AUTHOR. one
the figure of dyspeptic youth; nay, even than any
genuine ‘consciousness of power’ that is sufficient-
ly objective and shapely to be seen, known, and
named by its owner. I think so highly of that
letter as a diagnostic, that if you carry out your
intention of going to Edinburgh, it will much
gratify me if you will accept one or two notes of
introduction to friends of) mine there, whose good
opinion, if you win it, may be.of-use to you. ..°s. 2).
Let me know how things fare with you, and. be
sure of the increased interest and good will—
which I hope that further knowledge may ripen into
friendship — of yours faithfully, Sydney Dobell.”’
_ When relieved from his duties as a teacher in
Glasgow, young Gray —now engaged on a play —
after the model of Shakespeare, anon upon a descrip-
tive poem after a manner of his own, and filling up
every interval of time with a correspondence as.
voluminous as that conducted by a Minister of State
—must have been both an enigma and an annoyance
_ to the humble household at Merkland.
oa Sek at F ‘ ;
ae Ps - :
*
.
MEMOIR OF THE AUTHOR. 51
offers £5 towards its publication. I shall have it
ready for you by Saturday first. You must ask
~ Hedderwick if he will read it; and perhaps Sheriff
Bell and other Glasgow critics would look at it. Do
Idream?’”’ To Freeland likewise, who was one of
bis most regular and welcome visitors, he had
scrawled out a high-flown dedication ending with
these words: ‘‘ Before I enter that nebulous uncer-
tain land of shadowy notions and tremulous wonder-
ings, — standing on the threshold of the sun and
looking back, —I cry thee, O Beloved! a last fare-
well, lingeringly, passionately, without tears.”’
Although seeing much to admire in the poem of
“The Luggie,’’ I hesitated to gaurantee it such a
reception as would render its publication profitable.
Some other opinions which were obtained in Glas-
gow were more adverse. Moreover, circumstances
prevented me, at the time, from taking any active
initiative. Delay after delay occurred; but there
was no delay on the part of the insidious foe with
which the young poet contended. September came,
and he wrote despairingly to Logan: “If my book
be not immediately gone on with, I fear I may never
see it. Disease presses closely on me. Reasons
innumerable I could urge for the lawful sweetness
of my desire, but your goodness will suggest them.
52 MEMOIR OF THE AUTHOR.
fe Ree. The merit of my MSS. is very little, — mere
hints of better things, — crude notions harshly lan-
guaged: but that must be overlooked. They are
left not to the world (wild thought!) but as the
simple, possible, sad, only legacy I can leave to —
those who have loved and love me.”
It was a hard task to resist such appeals. Nor
were they wholly resisted. There was much dis-
cussion, and even some movement, but the matter
hung fire. Glasgow was a bad field for the publica-
tion of poetry. The result to the emaciated and
feeble author might be failure and disappointment,
hastening the .mexorable change. November with
its: gloom arrived, and Gray, obviously feeling his
end very near, made a final appeal to Mr. Dobell, —
the stanch friend whom he had never seen, and
was destined never to see. ‘‘Surely,’”? he wrote,
‘he to whom the poem —the old, incomplete, de-
spised, beloved poem —is dedicated, shall read it.
Dear Mr. Dobell, will you read ‘The Luggie,’ and
see whether or not it is worthy of your favor or ac-
ceptance? I have inscribed it to you, after the
ancient manner of Thomson. God knows it is not
much; but, as*I said to you a year ago, @ is all
I have.’’ The tender bribe of the dedication was
modestly declined for reasons deemed satisfactory,
MEMOIR OF THE AUTHOR. 53
but with the aid of his lady friends at Hampstead,
and the ready co-operation of Mr. Macmillan, pub-
lisher, Cambridge, the poem was, without loss of
time, put into the hands of the printer. By a fortu-
nate accident, a specimen page beginning, ‘‘ How
beautiful! ’’ reached Merkland on the very day pre-
ceding his death. It was accompanied by the fol-
lowing note from the accomplished hand of the
authoress of ‘‘ Ethel”? : —
“ Upper-Terrace Lodge, Nov. 29.
«« My dear Mr. Gray, —I have heard from Mr. Macmillan this
morning. He says the MS. will form a volume like ‘Edwin of
Deira’; and the enclosed is a specimen page sent, with the print-
er’s estimate. I cannot resist the impulse to send it on to you,
because I think it will give you so much pleasure to see even this
small portion of your work already in the form in which I hope
before long we may see it published. After Mr. Dobell’s praise
of your poetry, you will hardly care for mine; yet I will say
briefly that those sonnets which I found time to read before send-
ing off the MS. to Cambridge, impressed me deeply with their
truth and beauty, and rare excellence and simplicity of pathos.
It seems to me, too, that in your poetry, even the most mournful,
there is a shining forth of that hopeful, loving faith in God’s love,
which it is indeed a good thing for poets to teach, and which I
earnestly trust is the abiding solace and rest of your own spirit.
I can only write these few lines now; but believe that I am
always, with much sympathy, sincerely your friend,
‘¢MARIAN JAMES.”
54 MEMOIR OF THE AUTHOR.
As he gazed upon the neatly-printed page, he
seemed to feel that the dream of his life was about
to be fulfilled. He read its clear type as if by
the reflection of a light caught from the spiritual
world. That it was ‘‘ good news,” he said; that he
might now subside tranquilly —‘‘ without tears ”’
—into his eternal rest, he probably felt. Next
day, the 3d of December, 1861, the shadow of
utter blackness came down upon the humble house-
hold at Merkland, blinding all eyes. David Gray
was no more. His spirit had been borne gently
away on the wings of the strong and beautiful
promises breathed from the Book of Life, — almost
his last words being, ‘‘God has love, and I have
faith.’”? He was in his twenty-fourth year. Among
his papers the following memorial was found, writ-
ten in his own clear hand :—
MY EPITAPH.
Below lies one whose name was traced in sand, —
He died not knowing what it was to live: |
Died while the first sweet consciousness of manhood
And maiden thought electrified his soul:
Faint beatings in the calyx of the rose.
Bewildered reader, pass without a sigh
In a proud sorrow! There is life with God,
In other kingdom of a sweeter air :
In Eden every flower is blown. Amen.
Davip GRAY.
Sept. 27, 1861.
MEMOIR OF THE AUTHOR. BB
Whether these lines will yet be inscribed on any
stone, I know not. At all events, it will not be
among the congregated tombs of the great ones
of all time. Westminster Abbey was not for him.
If, in any possible future, there arose before him
a vision of its solemn arches, its silent yet elo-
quent sculptures, and, its groups of pilgrim wor-
shippers, it was only at the end of a term of years
“which he was fated never to reach. But not the
less peacefully will his spirit rest in the near
neighborhood of that home from which his affec-
tions were never weaned, and of that stream whose
low murmur he labored, through years of passion-
ate yearning, to exalt into an eternal melody.
Not far from Merkland, on an elevation a short
distance from the highway, there is situated a
lonely place of sepulture, surrounded by a low,
rude wall of stone, with a little’ watch-tower over
the entrance-gate, useful for shelter and observa-
tion during nights, long since bygone, when grave-
yards were broken into and plundered, but now
occupied with the few implements necessary for
the performance of the last mortal rites. It has
neither church nor house attached, and is known
as the ‘‘ Auld Aisle Burying-ground.’”’ With the
poet it had been a favorite place of resort and
56 MEMOIR OF THE AUTHOR. .
meditation. He could see from it the Luggie, the
Bothlin burn, the Woodilee farm, all the localities”
which he most loved. There, as appeared from
the dates on the gravestones, had the bones of.
his ancestors reposed for above two hundred years ;
and thither, on the Saturday after his death, were
his own remains carried,—on hand-spokes, after
the old Scotch fashion, — followed by about thirty
mourners. The wintry day had been lowering,
but the hour of the funeral was brightened with
gleams of clear sunshine, and in the midst of many
‘regrets, yet of some soothings, all that was mortal
of David Gray was laid deep in the mould, near
a solitary ash-tree,—the only tree in the place,
—now bare and disconsolate, but erelong to break
into foliage, and be an aviary for the songs of,
summer.
In person, the ‘deceased poet was tall, with a -
slight stoop. His head was not large, but his
temperament was of the keenest and brightest
edge. With black curling hair, eyes dark, large,
and lustrous, and a complexion of almost feminine
delicacy, his appearance never failed to make a
favorable impression on strangers. Yet with some
of his fastest friends—such as Dobell and Mrs.
Nichol—he never became personally acquainted.
MEMOIR OF THE AUTHOR. 5Y
That he was gifted with poetic genius there is
enough, I think, in his brief life-story, apart alto-
gether from his lyrical achievements, to prove.
No mere flash of vanity could so have shaped
itself into the nimbus of a genuine inspiration.
What further evidence of supreme endowment he
- might have furnished to the world, had he lived,
we can only of course guess. Morally, he was, as
far as I can discover, singularly pure, and worthy
of the kindly interest which he awakened in so
many quarters. One overmastering passion — an
ever-burning desire for fame — had apparently swal-
lowed up every other in his bosom. The simple
love of poetry he may have been too apt to in-
terpret as the essential and celestial gift. He may
have been too, apt to mistake the whisperings of
ambition and conceit for the authentic oracles of
prophecy. But, on the other hand, is not a strong,
irrepressible, deeply-inherent impulse but the quick-
ening, in many cases, of veritable power? At all
events, looking at the superlative struggle of this
son of a Scotch handloom weaver, and at its sad,
unsatisfied end, generous readers—and readers
who are not generous can never be wholly just —
will recognize in him a spirit freeing itself, at
the very outset of life, from all grovelling con-
3 *
58 MEMOIR OF THE AUTHOR.
tagion, shaping forth its own magnificent destiny,
and pursuing its divine ideal with the steadfast-
ness of an angelic will. How far his posthumous
writings may win for him the laurels for which,
through every accident of fortune, he incessantly
sighed and toiled, I hesitate to predict. Inasmuch,
<2
, : eae
j ; Ee eae =
. if. =A
; + elie g Ab satel ve
= — ae or
however, as there are many who knew and loved
him, and will dwell often and fondly on his pages,
—the unfinished columns of a temple suddenly ar-
rested in the building, —the words of the mighty
master may be fairly, not foolishly or falsely ap-
plied : —
«‘ Death makes no conquest of this conqueror ;
For now he lives in Fame, though not in life.”
GLASGOW.
PINAL MEMORIAL S.
A, Bo ent (Navee \ Viooen
ae in a by-road, about a mile from the
small town of Kirkintilloch, and eight miles
from the city of Glasgow, stands a cottage one
story high, roofed with slate, and surrounded by
a little kitchen-garden. A whitewashed lobby,
leading from the front to the back door, divides
this cottage into two sections: to the right is a
room fitted up as a handloom-weaver’s workshop ;
to the left is a kitchen paved with stone, and open-
ing into a tiny carpeted bedroom.
In the workshop, a father, daughter, and sons
work all day long at the loom. In the kitchen, a
handsome, cheery Scottish matron busies herself
like a thrifty housewife, and brings the rest of the
family about her at meals. All day long the soft
hum of the loom is heard in the workshop; but
when night comes, mysterious doors are thrown
60 FINAL MEMORIALS.
open, and the family retires to sleep in extraor-
dinary mural recesses. | .
In this humble home David Gray, the handloom-
weaver, has resided for upwards of twenty years,
and managed to rear a family of eight children, —
five boys and three girls. His eldest son, David,
author of The Luggie and other Poems, is the hero
of the present true history. :
David was born on the 29th of January, 1838.
He alone, of all the little household, was destined
to receive a decent education. From early child-
hood the dark-eyed little fellow was noted for his
wit and cleverness; and it became the dream of
his father’s life that he should become a scholar.
At the parish-school of Kirkintilloch he learned to
read, write, and cast up accounts, and was, more-
over, iustructed in the Latin rudiments. Partly
through the hard struggles of his parents, and
partly through his own severe labors as a pupil-
teacher and private tutor, he was afterwards en-
abled to attend the classes at the Glasgow Uni-
versity. In common with other rough country
lads, who live up dark alleys, subsist chiefly on
oatmeal and butter, forwarded from home, and
eventually distinguish themselves in the class-
room, he had to fight his way onward amid poy-
FINAL MEMORIALS. 61
erty and privation; but in his brave pursuit of
knowledge nothing daunted him. It had been set-
tled at home that he should become a minister of
the Free Church of Scotland. Unfortunately, how-
ever, he had no love for the pulpit. Early in life
. he had begun to hanker after the delights of poet-
ical composition. He had devoured the poets from
Chaucer to Tennyson.- The yearnings thus awak-
ened in him had begun to express themselves in
many wild fragments, — contributions, for the most
part, to the poet’s-corner of a local newspaper, —
The Glasgow Citizen.
Up to this point there was nothing extraordinary
in the career or character of David Gray. Taken
at his best, he was an average specimen of the
persevering young Scottish student. But his soul
contained wells of emotion which had not yet been
stirred to their depths. When, at fourteen years
of age, he began to study in Glasgow, it was his
custom to go home every Saturday night, in order
to pass the Sunday with his parents. These Sun-
days at home were chiefly occupied with rambles
in the neighborhood. of Kirkintilloch ; wanderings
on the sylvan banks of the Luggie, the beloved
little river which flowed close to his father’s door.
In Luggieside awakened one day the dream which
62 FINAL MEMORIALS.
developed all the hidden beauty of his character,
and eventually kindled all the faculties of his in-
tellect. Had he been asked to explain the nature
of this dream, David would have answered vaguely
enough, but he would have said something to the
following effect: ‘‘I’m thinking none of us are
quite contented; there’s a climbing impulse to
heaven in us all that won’t let us rest for a mo-
ment. Just now I’d be happy if I knew a little
more. I’d give ten years of life to see Rome, and
Florence, and Venice, and the grand places of old;
and to feel that I wasn’t a burden on the old folks.
I’ll be a great man yet! and the old home — the
Luggie and Lartshore Wood —shall be famous for
my sake.’”’ He could only have measured his am-
bition by the love he bore his home. ‘‘I was —
born, bred, and cared for here, and my folk are
buried here. I know every nook and dell for.
miles around, and they’re all dear to me. My
own mother and father dwell here, and in my own
wee room (the tiny carpeted bedrdom above al-
luded to) I first learned to read poetry. I love
my home; and it’s for my home’s sake that I love
fame.”’ .
At twenty-one years of age, when this dream was
strongest in him, David was a tall young man,
- FINAL MEMORIALS. 63
: slightly but firmly built, and with a stoop at the
a
shoulders. His head was small, fringed with black
curly hair. Want of candor was not his fault,
’ though he seldom looked one in the face; his eyes,
however, were large and dark, full of intelligence and
humor, harmonizing well with the long thin nose and
nervous lips. The great black eyes and woman’s
mouth betrayed the creature of impulse; one whose
reasoning faculties were small, but whose tempera-
ment was like red-hot coal. He sympathized with
much that was lofty, noble, and true in poetry, and
with much that was absurd and suicidal in the poet.
He carried sympathy to the highest pitch of enthu-
siasm ; he shed tears over the memories of Keats
and Burns, and he was corybantic in his execution
of a Scotch:‘‘reel.’’ i lle gre Ge
FINAL MEMORIALS. q1
in welcome; and how was he to make his trem-
bling voice heard above the roar and tumult of |
those streets? The very policemen seemed to
look suspiciously at the stranger. To his sensi-
tively Scottish ear the language spoken seemed
quite strange and foreign; it had a painful, home-
less sound about it, that sank nervously on the
heart-strings. As he wandered about the streets,
he glanced into coffee-shop after coffee-shop, see-
ing “beds” ticketed in each fly-blown window.
His pocket contained a sovereign and a few. shil-
lings, but he would need every penny. Would
not a bed be useless extravagance? he asked him-
self. Certainly. Where, then, should he pass the
night? In Hyde Park! He had heard so much
about this part of London that the name was quite
familiar to him. Yes, he would pass the night in
the Park. Such a proceeding would save money,
and be exceedingly romantic; it would be just the
right sort of beginning for a poet’s struggle in
London! So he strolled into the great Park, and
wandered about its purlieus till morning. In re-
marking upon this foolish conduct, one must reflect
that David was strong, heartsome, full of healthy
youth. It was a frequent boast of his that he
scarcely ever had a day’s illness.
12 FINAL MEMORIALS.
Whether or not his fatal complaint was caught
during this his first night in London is uncertain,
but some few days afterwards David wrote thus
to his father: ‘‘By the by, I have had the worst
cold I ever had in my life. ‘I cannot get it away
properly, but I feel a great deal better to-day.’
Alas! violent cold had settled down upon his
lungs, and insidious death was already slowly ap-
proaching him. So little conscious was he of his
danger, however, that we find him writing to a
friend: ‘‘ What brought me here? God knows,
for I don’t. Alone in such a place is a horrible
ting Ae is. People don’t seem to understand me.
.... Westminster Abbey; I was there all day
yesterday. If I:live.I shall be buried there eee
help me God! A completely defined consciousness
of great. poetical genius is my only antidote against
utter despair and despicable failure.”’ —
What were David’s qualifications for a struggle
in which, year after year, hundreds miserably per-
ish? Considerable knowledge of Greek, Latin, and
French, great miscellaneous reading, a clerkly hand-
writing, and a bold purpose; these were slender
‘qualifications, but, while health lasted, there was
hope. !
David and Blank did not meet until upwards of
FINAL MEMORIALS. 73
_aweek after their’ arrival in London, but each had
_ soon been apprised of the other’s presence in the
city. Finally, they came together. David’s first
- impulse was to describe his lodgings, situated in
a by-street in the Borough. ‘‘A cold, cheerless
bedroom, Bob: nothing but a blanket to cover
me. For God’s sake, get me out of it!’? The
friends were walking side by side in the neighbor-
hood of the New Cut, looking about them with
curious, puzzled eyes, and now and then drawing
each other’s attention to sundry objects of interest.
‘‘ Have you been well?” inquired Blank. ‘‘ First-
rate,’’? answered David, looking as merry as possi- *
ble. Nor did he show any indications whatever
of illness. He seemed hopeful, energetic, full of
health and spirits; his sole desire was to change
his lodging. It was not without qualms that he
surveyed the dingy, smoky neighborhood where
Blank resided. The sun was shedding dismal crim-
son light on the chimney-pots, and the twilight
was slowly thickening. The two climbed up three
flights of stairs to Blank’s bedroom. Dingy as
it was, this appartment seemed, in David’s eyes,
quite a palatial sanctum ; and it was arranged that
the friends should take up their residence together.
As speedily as possible, Blank procured David’s
4
x
74 FINAL MEMORIALS.
little stock of luggage; then, settled face to face
as in old times, both made very merry.
Blank’s first idea, on questioning David about
his prospects, was that his friend had had the
best of luck. You see, the picture drawn on
either side was a golden one; but the brightness
soon melted away. It turned out that David, on
arriving in London, had sought out certain gentle-
men whom he had formerly favored with his cor-—
respondence, — among others, Mr. Richard Monck-
ton Milnes, now Lord Houghton. Though not a
little astonished at the appearance of the boy-poet,
' Mr. Milnes had received him kindly, assisted him
to the best of his power, and made some work
for him in the shape of manuscript-copying. The
same gentleman had also used his influence with
literary people, —to very little purpose, however.
The real truth turned out to be that David was
disappointed and low-spirited. ‘It’s weary work,
Bob; they don’t understand me; I wish I was
back in Glasgow.’’ It was now that David told
his friend all about that first day and night in
London, and how he had already begun a poem
about ‘‘ Hyde Park,’’ how Mr. Milnes had been
good to him, had said that he was ‘‘a poet,” but
had insisted on his going back to Scotland, and
a
os
:
d
ipl eam
a Ay ae Bity
7 e hes
FINAL MEMORIALS. © 75
: becoming a minister. David did not at all like the
notion of returning home. He thought he had
every chance of making his way in London. About
this time he was bitterly disappointed by the rejec-
tion of “The Luggie’’ by Mr. Thackeray, to whom
Mr. Milnes had sent it, with a recommendation that
it should be inserted in the Cornhill Magazine. The
poem, however, for half a dozen reasons, was utterly
“unsuited to the pages of a popular periodical. —
Mr. Milnes was the first to perceive that the
young adventurer was seriously ill. After a hur-
ried call on his patron one day in May, David re-
joined Blank in the near neighborhood. ‘‘ Milnes
says I’m to go home and keep warmy and he ’ll
send his own doctor to me.’’ This was done. The
doctor came, examined David’s chest, said very
little, and went away, leaving strict orders that
the invalid should keep within doors, and take
great care of himself. Neither David nor Blank
liked the expression of the doctor’s face at all.
It soon became evident that David’s illness was of
a most serious character. Pulmonary disease had set
in ; medicine, blistering, all the remedies employed
in the early stages of his complaint, seemed of little
avail. Just then David read the Life of John Keats,
a book which impressed him with a nervous fear of
76 . FINAL MEMORIALS.
impending dissolution. He began to be filled with
conceits droller than any he had imagined in health.
“‘ Tf I were to meet Keats in heaven,’’ he said one
day, ‘‘ I wonder if I should know his face from his
pictures?’’ Most frequently his. talk was of labor
uncompleted, hope deferred; and he began to pant
for free country air. ‘‘If I die,’’ he said, on a
' certain occasion, ‘‘I shall have one consolation, —
Milnes will write an introduction to the poems.’’
At another time, with tears in his eyes, he re-
peated Burns’s epitaph. Now and then, too, he
had his fits of frolic and humor, and would laugh
and joke over his unfortunate position. It cannot
be said that Mr. Milnes and his friends were at
all lukewarm about the case of their young friend ;
on the contrary, they gave him every practical as-
sistance. Mr. Milnes himself, full of the most del-
icate sympathy, trudged to and fro between his own
house and the invalid’s lodging ; his pockets laden
with jelly and beef-tea, and his tongue tipped with
kindly comfort. Had circumstances permitted, he-—
would have taken the invalid into his own house.
Unfortunately, however, David was compelled to re-
main, in company with Blank, in a chamber which
seemed to have been constructed peculiarly for the
- purpose of making the occupants as uncomfortable
FINAL MEMORIALS. mt
ag possible. There were draughts everywhere :
through the chinks of the door, through the win-
dows, down the chimney, and up through the floor-
ing. When the wind blew, the whole tenement
seemed on the point of crumbling to atoms; when
the rain fell, the walls exuded moisture ; when the
| sun shone, the sunshine only served to increase the
characteristic dinginess of the furniture. Occasional
visitors, however, could not be fully aware of these
inconveniences. It was in the night-time, and in
bad weather, that they were chiefly felt; and it
required a few days’ experience to test the super-
lative discomfort of what David (in a letter written
afterwards) styled ‘‘ the dear old ghastly bankrupt
garret.””? His stay in these quarters was destined
to be brief. Gradually, the invalid grew homesick.
Nothing would content him but a speedy return to
Scotland. He was carefully sent off by train, and ,
arrived safely in his little cottage home far north. |
Great, meanwhile, had been the commotion in the
handloom weaver’s cottage, after the receipt of this
bulletin, ‘‘I start off to-night at five o’clock by the
Edinburgh and Glasgow Railway, right on to Lon-
don, in good health and spirits.”” A great cry arose
in the household. He was fairly ‘‘ daft” ; he was
throwing away all his chances in the world; the
*
mg FINAL MEMORIALS.
verse-writing had turned his head. Father and
mother mourned together. The former, though in-
competent to judge literary merit of any kind, per-
ceived that David was hot-headed, only halfeducat-
ed, and was going to a place where thousands of
people were starving daily. But the suspense was
not to last long. The. darling son, the secret hope
and pride, came back to the old people sick to
death. All rebuke died away before the pale, sad
face, and the feeble, tottering body ; and David was
welcomed to the cottage hearth with silent prayers.
They set him in the old place beside the fire, and
hushed the house. The mother went about her
work with a heavy heart; the father, when “the
day’s toil was over, sat down before the kitchen
fire, smoking his pipe, speaking very little, and
looking sternly at the castles that crumbled away
in the blazing coal. :
It was’ now placed beyond a doubt that the dis-
ease was one of mortal danger; yet David, sur-
rounded again by his old Lares, busied himself with
many bright and delusive dreams of ultimate re-
covery. Pictures of a pleasant, dreamy convales-
cence in a foreign clime floated before him morn and
night, and the fairest and dearest oe the dreams was
Italy. Previous to his departure for London, he
FINAL MEMORIALS. "9
had concocted a wildischeme for visiting Florence,
and throwing himself on the poetical sympathy of
Robert Browning. He had even thought of enlist-
ing in the English Garibaldian Corps, and by that
means gaining his cherished wish. ‘‘ How about
Italy?’ he wrote to Blank, after returning home.
- Do you still entertain its delusive motions? Pour
out your soul before me: I am asachild.” All at
once a new dream burst upon him. A local doctor
insisted that the invalid should be removed to a
milder climate, and recommended Natal. In a letter
full of coaxing tenderness, David besought Blank,
for the sake of old days, to accompany him thither.
Blank answered indecisively, but immediately made
all endeavors to grant his friend’s wish. Meantime,
he received the following, which we give as a fair
specimen of David’s epistolary style : —
** Merkland, Kirkintilloch, 10th November, 1860.
«« Ever dear Bob, — Your letter causes me some uneasiness ; not
but that your numerous objections are numerous and vital enough,
but they convey the sad and firm intelligence that you cannot come
with me. I.—It is absolutely impossible for you to raise a sum
sufficient! . Now you know it is not necessary that I should go to
Natal; nay, I have, in very fear, given up the thought of it; but
we — or I—could go to Italy or Jamaica, — this latter, as I learn,
being the more preferable. Nor has there been any ‘crisis’
a
80 FINAL MEMORIALS.
come, as you say, I would n’t cause you, much trouble (forgive me
for hinting this), but I believe we could be happy as in the dear
old times. Dr. (whose address I don’t know), supposes that I
shall be able to work (?) when I reach a more genial climate; and
if that should prove the result, why, it is a consummation devoutly
to be wished. But the matter of money bothers me. What I
wrote to you was all hypothetical, —i. e. things have been carried
so far, but I have not heard whether or not the subscription had
been gone on with. And, supposing for one instant the utterly
preposterous supposition that I had money to carry us both, then
comes the II. objection, — your dear mother! I am not so far
gone, though I fear far enough, to ignore that blessed feeling.
But if it were for your good? Before God, if I thought it would
in any way harm your health (that cannot be) or your hopes, I
would never have mooted the proposal. On the contrary, I feel
from my heart that it would benefit you; and how much would it
not benefit me. But Iam baking without flour. The cash is ae
in my hand, and I fear never will be; the amount I would require
is not so easily gathered. ae
‘« Dobell * is again laid up. He is at the Isle of Wight, at some
* Sydney Dobell, author of Balder, The Roman, &c. This gentle-
man’s kindness to David, whom he never saw, is beyond all praise.
Nor was the invalid ungrateful. “Poor, kind, half-immortal spirit
here below,’’ wrote David, alluding to Dobell, “shall I know thee
when we meet new-born into eternal existence? .. . . Dear friend
Bob, did you ever know a nobler? I cannot get him out of my mind.
I would write to him daily, would it not pest him. Yet, as you and I
know, nothing can pest him. What he has done for me is enormous;
almost as much as what you have done; almost as much as I long to
do for both of you.” Again and again, in much the same words, did
he repeat this affectionate plaint. ;
* *
FINAL MEMORIALS. 81
establishment called the Victoria Bake Iam told that his friends
deem his life in constant danger. He asks for your address. I
shall send it only to-day ; wait until you hear what he has got to
say. He would prefer me to go to Brompton Hospital. J would
go anywhere for a change. If I don’t get money somehow or some-
where, I shall die of ennui. A weary desire for change, life, ex-
citement, of every, any kind, possesses me, and without you what am
12 There is no other person in the world whom I could spend a
week with, and thoroughly enjoy it. O how I desire to smoke a
cigar, and have a pint and a chat with you.
«By the way, how are you getting on? Have you lots to
do? and well paid for it? Or is life a lottery with you? and
the tea-caddy a vacuum ? and —— a snare? and —— a night-
mare? Do you dream yet on your old rickety sofa in the dear
old ghastly bankrupt garret at No. 66% Write to yours eternally,
«Davin Gray.”
The proposal to go abroad was soon abandoned,
partly because the invalid began to evince a ner-
vous homesickness, but chiefly because it was im-
possible to raise a sum of money sufficient. But
a residence in Kirkintilloch throughout the winter
was, on all accounts, to be avoided. A friend,
therefore, subscribed to the Brompton Hospital for
chest complaints, for the express purpose of pro-
curing David admission. One bleak wintry day,
not long after the receipt of the above letter, Blank
was gazing out of his lofty lodging-window, when
4% F
82 FINAL MEMORIALS.
a startling vision presented itself, in the shape of
David himself, seated with quite a gay look in an
open Hansom cab. In a minute the friends were
side by side, and one of Blank’s first impulses was
to rebuke David for the folly of exposing himself,
during such weather, in such a vehicle. This folly,
however, was on a parallel with David’s general
habits of thought. Sometimes, indeed, the poor
boy became unusually thoughtful, as when, during
his illness, he wrote thus to Blank: ‘‘ Are you
| remembering that you will need clothes? These.
are things you take no concern about, and so you
may be seedy without knowing it. By all means
hoard a few pounds if you can (I require none) for
any emergency like this. _ Brush your excellent —
topcoat, —it is the best and warmest I ever had
on my back. Mind, you have to pay ready money
- for any new coat. A seedy man will not ‘ get on’
if he requires, like you, to call personally on his
employers.’’ The mother of a family might have
written the foregoing. ;
David had come to London in order to go either
to Brompton or to Torquay, —the hospital’ at which
last-named place was thrown open to him by Mr.
Milnes. Perceiving his dislike for the Temperance
Hotel, to which he had been conducted, Blank con-
3
FINAL MEMORIALS. 83
sented that he should stay in the ‘“ ghastly bank-
rupt garret ”’ until he should depart to one or other
of the hospitals. It was finally arranged that he
should accept a temporary invitation to a hydro-
pathic establishment at Sudbrook Park, Richmond.
Thither Blank at once conveyed him. Meanwhile,
his prospects were diligently canvassed by his nu-
merous friends. His own feelings at this time were
well expressed in a letter home. ‘‘I am dreadfully
afraid of Brompton: living among sallow, dolorous,
dying consumptives is enough to kill me.. Here
Iam as comfortable as can be: a fire in my room
all day, plenty of meat, and good society, — nobody
so ill as myself; but there, perhaps hundreds far
worse (the hospital holds 218 in all stages of the
disease, — 90 of them died last report), dying be-
side me, perhaps— it frightens me.’’ All at once
David began,.with a delicacy peculiar to him, to
consider himself an unwarrantable intruder at Sud-
brook Park. In the face of all persuasion, there-
fore, he joined Blank in London, — whence he
shortly afterwards departed for Torquay.
He left Blank in good spirits, — full of pleasant
Bntisipations of Devonshire scenery. But the sec-
ond day after his departure he addressed to Blank
a wild epistle, dated from one of the Torquay hotels.
84 FINAL MEMORIALS. -
He had arrived safe and sound, he said, and had
been kindly received by a friend of Mr. Milnes. —
He had at first been delighted with the town, and
everything init. He had gone to the hospital, had
been received by ‘‘ a nurse of death’’ (as he phrased
it), and had been inducted into the privileges of —
the place ; but on seeing his fellow-patients, some
in the last stages of disease, he had fainted away.
On coming to himself, he obtained an interview
with the matron. To his request for a private
apartment, she had answered, that to favor him in
that way would be to break written rules, and that
he must content himself with the common privi-
leges of the establishment. On leaving the ma-
tron, he had furtively stolen from the place, and
made his way through the night to the hotel. Be-
fore Blank had time to comprehend the state of
affairs, there came a second letter, stating that
David was on the point of starting for London.
‘Every ring at the hotel-bell makes me tremble,
fancying they are coming to take me away by
force. Had you seen the nurse! O that I were
back again at home, — mother! mother! mother! ”’
A few hours after Blank had read these lines in
miserable fear, arrived Gray himself, pale, anxious,
and trembling. He flung himself into Blank’s
\ .
‘FINAL MEMORIALS. "85
arms, with a smile of sad relief. ‘‘ Thank God!”’
he cried; ‘ that’s over, and I] am here!’’ Then
his cry was for home; he would die if he remained
longer adrift; he must depart at once. Blank per-
suaded him to wait for a few days, and in the
mean time saw some of his influential friends. The
- skill and regimen of a medical establishment being
necessary to him at this stage, it was naturally
concluded that he should go to Brompton; but
David, in a high state of nervous excitement,
scouted the idea. Disease had sapped the foun-
‘dations of the once strong spirit. ‘‘ Home —home
—home!” was his hourly cry. To resist these
frantic appeals would have been to hasten the end
of all. In the midst of winter, Blank saw him into
the train at Euston Square. 133
Moved evenly in sluggish pilotage.
The windless shades of quiet eventide
Slow gathered, and the sweet concordant tones
Of melody within the leafy brake
Died clearly, till the Mavis piped alone ;
Then softly from the jasper sky, a star
Drew radiant silver, brightening as the west
Darkened. But ere the semicircled moon
Shed her white light adown the lucent air,
“The Mavis ceased, and through the thin gloom
brake
The Corncraik’s curious cry, the sylvan voice
Of the shy bird that haunts the bladed corn ;
And suddenly, yet silently, the blue
Deepened, until innumerous white stars
Through crystal smooth and yielding ether diseped:
Not coldly, but in passionate June glow.
The Corncraik now, ’mong tall green-bladed corn,
Breasted her eggs with feathers dew-besprent,
And stayed her human cry. The silence left
134 THE LUGGIE.
A gap within the soul, a sudden grief,
An emptiness in the low-sighing air. |
Then swooning through full night, the summered
| earth
Bosomed her children into tender rest ;
Now delicately chambered ladies breathe
Their souls asleep in white-limbed luxury.
O Virgins purest lipped! with snowy lids
Soft closed on living eyes! O unkissed cheeks,
Half-sunk in pillowy pressure, and round arms
In the sweet pettishness of silver dreams
Flung warm into the cold unheeding air!
Sleep! soft bedewer of infantine eyes,
Pouter of rosy little lips! plump hands
Are doubled into deeply dimpled fists
And stretched in rosy languor, curls are laid
In fragrance on the rounded baby-face,
Kiss-worthy darling! Stiller of clear tongues
And silvery laughter! Now the musical noise
Of little feet is silent, and blue shoes
THE LUGGIE. 135
No more come pattering from the nursery door.
Death is not of thee, Sleep! Thy calm domain
#
Is tempered with a dreamy bliss, and dimmed
With haunted glooms, and richly sanctified
With the fine elements of Paradise.
Burn in the gleaming sky, ye far-off Stars !
And thou, O inoffensive Urascont ! lift
The wonder of thy softness, the white shell
Of thy clear beauty, till the wholesome dawn
Wither thy brightness pale, and borrowed pride !
But sleep supine, on indolent afternoon
Ere the winds wake, and holy mountain airs
Descend, is sweet. OQ, let the bard describe
The sacred spot where, underneath the round
Green odoriferous sycamore, he lay
Sleepless, yet half asleep, in that one mood
When the quick sense ie duped, and angel wings
econ taal music. —Sweetand’dim
The sacred spot, beloved not alone
136 THE LUGGIE.
For its own beauty: but the memories,
The pictures of the past which in the mind
Arise in fair peobsAiNn, each distinct
With the soft hue of some peculiar mood,
Enchant to living lustre what before
Was to the untaught vision simply fair.
In a fair valley, carpeted with turf
Elastic, sloping upwards from the stream,
A pact sycamore in honeyed leaves
Most plenteous, murmurous with humming bees,
Shadows a well. . Darkly the crystal wag
Gleams cold, secluded; on its polenee breast
Imaging twining boughs. No pitcher breaks
Its natural sleep, except at morn and eve
When my good mother through the dewy grass
Walks patient with her vessels, bringing home
The clear refreshment. Every blowing Spring,
A snowdrop with pure streaks of delicate green
Upon its inmost leaves, hoa withered grass
Springs whitely, and within its limpid breast
THE LUGGIE. 137
_ Is mirrored miiely. Not a finger plucks
This hidden beauty ; but it blooms and dies,
In lonely lustre blooms and lonely dies, ~~
Unknown, unloved, save by one simple heart:
Poetic, the creator of this song.
And after this frail luxury hath given
Its little life in keeping to the soul
Of all the worlds, a an Buddies ness
In lowly cleft, a foot or so above
The water. His dried leaves, and sik. and grass
He hither carries, lining all with hair
For softness. I have laid the hand that writes
These rhymes beloved, on the crimson breast,
Sleek-soft, that panted o’er the five unborn ;
While, leaf-hid, o’er me sang the watchful mate
Plaintive, and with a sorrow in the song,
In sylvan nook where anchoret might dwell
Contented. Often on September days,
When woods were efflorescent, and the fields
Refulgent with the bounty of the corn, -
138 THE LUGGIE.
And warming sunshine filled the breathless air
With a pale steam, — in heart-confused mood
Have I worn holidays enraptured there ;
For, O dear God! there is a pure delight
In dreaming: in those mental-weary times,
When the vext spirit finds a false content
In fashioning delusions. O, to lie
Supinely stretched upon ihe shaded turf,
Beholding through the opening of green leaves
White clouds in silence navigating slow
Cerulean seas illimitable! Hushed
The drowsy eee and, withva stilly sound
Like harmony of thought, the Luggie frets, —
Its bubbling mellowed to a musical hum
By distance. Then the influences faint,
Those visionary impulses that swell
The soul to inspiration, crowding come
Mysterious: and phantom memory
(Ghost of dead feeling) haunts the undissolved,
The unsubvertive temple of the soul !
THE LUGGIE.
But as through loamy meadows lipping slow
Hats the femeninged Luggie; and in spray
Leaps the mill-dam, and o’er the rocky flats
Spreads in black eddies ; So my first-born song
Hastes to the end in heedless vagrancy.
O ravishingly sweet the clacking noise
Of looms that murmur in our quiet dell!
No fairer valley Dyer ever dreamed, —
Dyer, best'river-singer, bard among
Ten thousand. Reader, hasten ye and come,
And see the Luggie wind her liquid stream
Through copsy villages and spiry towns ;
And see the Bothlin trotting swift of foot
From glades of alder, eager to combine
Her dimpling harmony with Luggie’s calm,
- Clear music, like the music of the soul.
But where you see the meeting, reader, stay,
_O stay and hear the music of the looms. |
Through homely rustic bridge with ivy shagged,
(Which you shall see if ever you do come
139
140 THE LUGGIE.
A summer pilgrim to our valley fair,)
The Luggie flows with bells of foam-like stars
About its surface. A smooth bleaching-green
Spreads its soft carpet to the open doors
Of simple houses, shining-white. Blue smoke
Curls through the breathing air to the tree-tops
Thin spreading, and is lost. A humming noise
Industrious is heard, the clack of looms,
Whereon sit maidens, homely fair, and full
Of household simpleness, who sing and weave,
And sing and weave through all the easy hours,
Each day to-morrow’s counterpart, and smooth
Memory the mirror wherein golden Hope,
Contented, sees herself. Here dwell an old
Couple whose lives have known twice forty years
(My mother’s parents), their sage spirits touched
With blest anticipation of a home
Celestial bright, wherein they may fulfil
The life which death discovers. Last winter night
I, an accustomed visitant, beheld
THE LUGGIE.
The dear old pair. He in an easy-chair
Lay dozing, while beside her noiseless wheel
She sat, her brow into her lap declined,
And half asleep! Sure sign, my mother said,
| Of the conclusion of mortality.
A boy of ten, their grandson, on the floor
Lay stretched in early slumber ; all the three
Unconscious of my entrance. A strange sight,
141
Fraught with strange lessons for the human soul.
In the first portion of her married life,
This woman, now, alas! so weary, old,
Bore Saachtors five; of Melee loess sons
An equal number. Some of them died young,
But six are yet alive, and dwelling all
Within a mile of her own house. The flower,
The idol of the mother, and her pride,
Dear magnet of all hopes, embodiment
_ Of heavenly blessings, was the youngest son,
Youngest of all. Me often has she told
How not a man could fling the stone with him ;
142 THE LUGGIE.
That in his shoes he outran racers fleet
Barefooted ; dancing on the shaven green
On summer holidays and autumn eves
(As to this day they do) his laugh was clearest,
Lightest his step; and he could thrill the hearts
Of simple women by a natural grace,
And perilous recital of love-tales.
I cannot tell by what mysterious means,
Day-dream, or silver vision of the night, |
Or sacred show of reason, picturing
A smooth ambition and calm happiness
For years of weaker age, — but suddenly
In prime of life there flowered in his soul
An inextinguishable love to be
A minister of God. When holy schemes
Govern the motions of the spirit, ways
Are found to compass them. With wary care;
Frugality praiseworthy, and the strength
Of two strong arms, he\in the summer months
Hoarded a competence equivalent
THE LUGGIE. « 143
To all demands, until the paasions eid:
Whate’er by manual labor he had gained
Through the clear summer months in verdant fields,
With brooks of silver laced, and cooled with inde!
Was spent in winter in the smoky town.
But when his annual course of study past
He with his presence blessed his father’s house,
With what a sacred sanctity of hope
Bager his mother dreamed, or garrulous
Spake of him everywhere, — his foreign ways,
And midnight porings o’er uncanny books.
His father, ay a stern delight suffused,
Grew a proud man of some importance now
In his own eyes; for who in all the vale
Had e’er a son so noble and so learned,
So ay as his own ?
So time wore on: but when three years complete
Had perfected their separate destinies,
A change stole o’er the current of their lives, ©
As a cloud-shadow glooms the crystal stream.
144 THE LUGGIE.
Their son came hone, but witle his coming came
Sorrow. A hue too beautifully fair |
Brightened his cheek, as sunlight tints a cloud.
His face had caught a trick of joy more sad_
Than visible grief; and all the subtle frame
Of human life, so wonderfully wrought,
A mystery of mechanism, was wearing
In sore uneasy manner to the grave.
What need to tell what every heart must know
In sympathy prophetical ? Long time, :
A varied year in seasons four complete
(For the white snow-drop o’er my mother’s well
Twice oped its whitest leaves among the green)
He is consuming. It must needs have been
A weary trial to the thinking soul, :
Thus with a consciousness of coming death,
The grim ‘Attenuation! evermore
Nearing insatiate. At her spinning-wheel
His mother sat; and when his voice grew faint,
A simple whistle by his pillow lay,
THE LUGGIE. 145
And at its sound she entered patient, sad,
Her soothing love to minister, her hope —
To nourish to its fading. But his breath
Grew weaker ever ; and his dry, pale lips
Closing upon the little instrument,
Could not produce a faintly audible note !
A little bell, the plaything of a child,
Now at his bedside hung, and its clear tones
Tinkled the weary summons. ‘Thus his time
Narrowed to a completion, and his soul,
negmereal in its nature, through his eyes
Yearning, beheld the majesty of Him
: Great in His mystery of godliness,
Fulfiller of the dim Apocalypse !
Twelve years have past since then, and he is
now
A happy memory in the hearts of those
Who knew him; for to know him was to love.
And oft I deem it better, as the fates,
7 J
146 THE LUGGIE. es
Or God, whose will is fate, have proven it ;
For had he lived and fallen (as who of us
Doth perfectly ? and let him that is proud
Take heed lest he do fall) he would have been
A ace to them in their aged hours.
But now he is an honor and delight,
A treasure of the memory, ajoy .
Unutterable ; by the lone fireside
They never tire to speak his praise, and say
How, if he had been spared, he would have been
So great, and good, and noble as (they say)
The country knows ; although I know full well
That not a man 4 all the parish round
Speaks of him ever: he is now forgot,
And this his natal valley knows him not.— -
And this his natal valley knows him not ?
The well belovéd, nothing ? — the fair face
And pliant limbs, poor indistinctive dust ?
The nae blood, and network of the brain
Crumbled as a clod crumbles! Is this all?
THE LUGGIE.
A turf, a date, an epitaph, and then
Oblivion, and profound nonentity !
And thus his natal valley knows him not.
Trees murmur to the passing wind, streams flow,
Flowers shine with dew-drops in the shady glens,
_ All unintelligent creation smiles
In loving-kindness ; but, like a light dream
Of morning, man arises in fair show,
Like the hued rainbow from incumbent gloom
Elicited, he shines against the sun, —
A momentary glory. Not a voice
Remains to whisper of his whereabouts :
The palpable body in its mother’s breast
Dissolves, and every feature of the face
is lost in feculent changes. 0 black earth !
Wrap from bare eyes the slow decaying form,
The beauty rotting from the living hair,
The body made incapable through sin
God’s Spirit to contain. Earth, wrap it close
Till the heavens vibrate to the trump of doom !
148 THE LUGGIE.
This is not all: for the invisible soul
Betrays the soft desire, the quenchless wish,
To live a purer life, more proximate
To the prime Fountain of all life. The power
Of vivid fancy and the boundless scenes
(High colored with the coloring of Heaven),
Creations of imagination, tell
The mortal yearnings of immortal souls !
Now, while around me in blind labor, winds
Howl, and the rain-drops lash the streaming pane ;
Now, while the pine-glen on the mountain-side
Roars in its wrestling with the sightless foe,
And the black tarn grows see with the storm ; —
Amid the external elemental war,
My soul with calm comportment — more becalmed
By the wild tempest furious without —
Sits in her sacred cell, and ruminates
On Death, severe discloser of fate life.
When the well-known and once embraceable form
Is but a handful of white dust, the soul
=
THE LUGGIE. 149
Grows in divine dilation, nearer God.
Therefore grieve not, my. heart, that unsustained
His OeInGRy died among us, that no more,
While yet the grass is hoary and the dawn
Lingers, he shyly through untrodden fields
Brushes his early path: that he no more
Beneath the beech, in lassitude outstretched,
Ponders the holy strains of Israel’s King ;
For in translated glory, and new clothed
With Incorruptible, he purer air
Breathes in a fairer valley. There no storm
Maddens as now; no flux, and no opaque,
But all is calm, and permanent, and clear, —
God’s glory and the Lamb illumine all!
Now ends this song, — not for selfhonor sung,
But in the Luggie’s service. It hath been
A crownéd vision and a silver dream,
That I should touch this valley with renown
Eternal, make the fretting waters gleam
150 THE LUGGIE.
In light above the common light of earth.
The shoreless air of heaven is purer here,
The golden beams more keenly crystalline,
The skies more deeply sapphired. For to me
About these emerald fields and lawny hills
There linger glories which you cannot see,
And influences which you cannot feel,
Delight and incommunicable woe!
My home is here; and like a patient star,
Shining between untroubled Paradise
And my own soul, a mother shines therein,
The sole perfection of true womanhood :
A father — with the wisdom which pertains
To gray experience, and that stern delight
In naked truth, and reason which belongs
To the intense reflective mind — hath told
His fifty winters here. And all the hopes
Which gild the present ; all the sad regrets
Which dull the past, are present to my soul
In the external forms and colorings
:
SAL ee. fe eee
THE LUGGIE. 151
Of this dear valley. Therefore do I yearn
To make its stream flow in undying verse,
Low-singing through the labyrinthine dell !
_ And let forgiving charity preclude
Harsh judgments from the singer: not that he
Fearfully would forestall the righteous word,
Blameworthy, spoken in kindness, and that truth
Which sanctions condemnation. Yet, dear Lord,
A youthful flattering of the spirit, touched
With a desire unquenchable, displays
My hope’s delirium. O, if the dream
Fade into nothing, into worse than naught,
Blackness of darkness like the golden zones
Of an autumnal sunset, and the night
Of unfulfilled ambition closes round
iy destiny, think what an awful hell’ ~~:
O’erwhelms the conquered soul! Therefore, O men
Who guard with jealousy and loving care
The honor of our sacred literature,
152 THE LUGGIE.
Read with a kindness born of trustful hope,
Dov rine rambling school-boy thoughts, too plain
To utter with a spasm, or clothe in cold
Mosaic fretwork of well-pleasing words,
Forgiving youth’s vagaries, want of skill,
And blind devotional passion for my home!
‘THE SHADOWS.
+« : =f
A POEM IN SONNETS.
tae ae
gat Se
oe NSS RGR
Fe? ae ort
ee ee
ie
Ti ln ee ae 4 2 i i
hie
Hung round, ah! not adorned, with pictures bold
| leat quaint, but roughly touched for the refined.
The chancel, not the charnel-house! For I
To God have raised a shrine immaculate
Therein, whereon His name to glorify,
And daily mercies meekly celebrate.
So in, scared breather! here no hint of death, —
Skull or cross-bones suggesting sceptic fear ;
Yea, rather calmer beauty, purer breath
‘Inhaled from a diviner atmosphere.
156 IN THE SHADOWS.
[* it must be; if it must be, 0 God!
That I die young, and make no further moans ;
That, underneath the unrespective sod,
In unescutcheoned privacy, my bones
Shall crumble soon, — then give me strength to bear
The last convulsive throe of too sweet breath!
I tremble from the edge of life, to dare »
The dark and fatal leap, having no faith,
No glorious yearning for the Apocalypse ;
But like a child that in the night-time cries
For light, I cry ; forgetting the eclipse
Of knowledge and our human destinies.
O peevish and uncertain soul! obey
The law of life in patience till the Day.
~
IN THE SHADOWS. 157
II.
“\)/ HOM the gods love die young.” The thought
is old;
And yet it soothed the sweet Athenian mind.
J take it with all pleasure, overbold,
| Perhaps, yet to its virtue much inclined
By an inherent love for what is fair.
This is the utter poetry of woe, —
-That the bright-flashing gods should cure despair
By love, and make youth precious here below.
I die, being young; and, dying, could become
A pagan, with the tender Grecian trust.
Let death, the fell anatomy, benumb
The hand that writes, and fill my mouth with
dust, — , \
Chant no funereal theme, but, with a choral
Hymn, O ye mourners! hail immortal youth av-
roral !
158 IN THE SHADOWS.
Lt;
NAH the tear-worthy oe consumption killed
In youthful prime, before the nebulous mind
Had its symmetric shapeliness defined,
Had its transcendent destiny fulfilled. —
’ May future ages grant me oracone room,
With Pollok, in the voiceless solitude
Finding his holiest rapture, happiest nrood ;
Poor White forever poring o’er the tomb ;
With Keats, whose lucid fancy mounting far
Saw heaven as an intenser, a more keen
Redintegration of the Beauty seen
And felt by all the breathers on this star ;
With gentle Bruce, flinging melodious blame
On the Future for an uncompleted name.
IN THE SHADOWS. ~ 159
7, IV.
() MANY a time with Ovid have I borne
My father’s vain, yet well-meant reprimand,
To leave the sweet-aired, clover-purpled land
Of rhyme, —its Lares loftily forlorn,
| With all their pure arenes unworn, —
To batten on the bare Theologies !
To quench a glory lighted at the skies,
Fed on one essence with the silver morn,
| Were of all blasphemies the most insane.
So deeplier given to the delicious spell
I clung to thee, heart-soothing Poesy !
Now on a sick-bed racked with arrowy pain
I lift white hands of gratitude, and ¢ry,
Spirit of God in Milton! was it well ?
160 IN THE SHADOWS.
Va
[422 night, on coughing slightly with sharp
| pain,
There came arterial blood, and with a sigh
Of absolute grief I cried in bitter vein,
That drop is my death-warrant: I must die.
Poor meagre life is mine, meagre and poor!
- Rather a piece of childhood thrown away ;
An adumbration faint ; the overture
To stifled music; year that ends in May ;
The sweet beginning of a tale unknown ;
A dream unspoken ; promise unfulfilled ;
A morning with no noon, a rose unblown, —
All its deep rich vermilion crushed and killed
I’ th’ bud by frost : — Thus in false fear I cried,
Forgetting that to abolish death Christ died.
IN THE SHADOWS.
Viv
= y
G WEETLY, my mother! Go not.yet away, —
I have not told my story. O, not yet,
With the fair past before me, em lay
My cheek upon the pillow to forget.
0 sweet, fair past, my twenty years of youth
Thus thrown away, not fashioning a man ;
But fashioning a memory, forsooth !
_ More feminine than follower of Pan.
‘O God! let me not die for years and more!
Fulfil Thyself, and I will live then surely
Longer than a mere childhood. Now heartsore,
Weary, with being weary, — weary, purely.
In dying, mother, I can find no pleasure
Except in being near thee without measure.
161
162 IN THE SHADOWS.
VI.
H EW Atlas for my monument; upraise
A pyramid for my tomb, that, undestroyed
By rank, oblivion, and the hungry void,
My name shall echo through es nios days.
O careless conqueror! cold, abysmal grave |
Is it not sad — is it not sad, my heart —
To smother young ambition, and depart
Unhonored and unwilling, like death’s slave ?
No rare immortal remnant of my thought
Embalms my life; no poem, firmly reared
Against the shock of time, ignobly feared, — .
But all. my life’s progression come to nought.
Hew Atlas! build a pyramid in a plain!
O, cool the fever burning in my brain! ,
IN THE SHADOWS. 163
VIil.
peBe™ this entangling labyrinthine maze
Of doctrine, creed, and theory ; from vague,
Vain speculations: the detested plague
Of spiritual pride, and vile affrays
Sectarian, good Lord, deliver me!
Nature! thy placid monitory glory
Shines uninterrogated, while the story
Goes round of this and that theology,
This creed, and that, till patience close the list.
Once more on Carronben’s wind-shrilling height
To sit in sovereign solitude, and quite
Forget the hollow world, —a pantheist
Beyond Bonaventura! This were cheer
Passing the tedious tale of shallow pulpiteer.
it. IN THE SHADOWS. ~
IX.
A VALE of tears, a wilderness of woe,
iA ead unmeaning mystery of strife ;
Reason with Passion strives, and Feeling ever
Battles with Conscience, clear-eyed arbiter. :
Thus spake I in sad steed not long eo
To my dear fitlion of this human life,
Its jars and fantasies. Soft answered he, —
With soul of love strong as a mountain river | ;
We make ourselves. Son, you are what you are
Neither by fate nor ntovideue nor cause
External : all unformed humanity
Waiteth the stamp of individual laws ;
And as you love and act, the plastic spirit
Doth the impression evermore inherit.
a pal aati
A! eh eras, g..
IN THE SHADOWS. 165
X.
L431 Autumn we were four, and travelled far
With Phebe in her golden plenilune, .
0’ er stubble-fields where sheaves of harvest boon
Stood slanted. Many a clear and steadfast star
Twinkled its radiance eoreh crisp-leaved beeches,
Over the farm to which, with snatches rare
Of ancient ballads, songs, and saucy speeches,
‘He hurried, happy mad. Then each had there
A dove-eyed sister pining for him, four
Fair ladies legacied with loveliness,
Chaste as a group of stars, or lilies blown
In rural nunnery. O God! Thy sore,
Strange ways expound. Two to the grave have
gone
Without apparent reason more or less.
166, IN THE SHADOWS.
*
XI.
N OW, while the long-delaying ash assumes
The delicate April green, and, loud and clear,
Through the cool, yellow, mellow twilight glooms,
The thrush’s song enchants the captive ear; _
Now, while a shower is pleasant in the falling,
Stirring the still perfume that wakes around ;
Now, that doves mourn, and from the distance
calling,
The cuckoo answers, with a sovereign sound, —
Come, with thy native heart, O fan and tried !
But leave all books; for what with converse high,
Flavored with Attic wit, the time shall glide
On smoothly, as a river floweth by,
Or as on stately pinion, through the gray
Evening, the culver cuts his liquid way.
IN THE SHADOWS. 167
>: as.
Wet are all fair things at their death the fairest?
Beauty the beautifullest in decay ?
Why doth rich sunset clothe each closing day
With ever-new apparelling the rarest ? :
Why are the sweetest melodie all born
Of pain and sorrow? Mourneth not the dove
In the green forest gloom, an absent love?
Leaning her breast against that cruel thorn,
Doth not the nightingale, poor bird, complain
And integrate her uncontrollable woe
To such perfection, that to hear is pain ?
Thus, Sorrow and WaAthe alone realities —
Sweeten their ministration, and bestow |
On troublous life a relish of the skies !
168 | IN THE SHADOWS.
XTIT.
er well-beloved, is this all, this all ?
Gone, like a vapor which the potent morn *
Kills, and in killing glorifies ! I call
Through the lone night for thee, my dear first-
born
Soul-fellow ! but my heart vibrates in vain.
Ah! well I know, and often fancy forms
The weather-blown churchyard where thou art
lain, —
The Christiane whistling to the frequent storms.
But down the valley, by the river side,
Huge walnut-trees — bronze-foliaged, motionless
As leaves of metal — in their shadows hide
Warm nests, low music, and true tenderness.
But thou, betrothed! art far from me, from me.
O heart! be merciful — I loved him utterly.
ae
IN THE SHADOWS. 169
XIV.
| Oro ba {! when I have passed, with deathly
‘swoon,
Into the ghost-world, immaterial, dim,
- O may nor time nor circumstance dislimn
My image from thy memory, as noon
Steals from the fainting bloom the cooling dew!
Like flower, itself completing bud and bell,
In lonely thicket, be thy sorrow true,
And in expression secret. Worse than hell
To see the grave hypocrisy, — to hear
The crocodilian sighs of summer friends
Outraging grief’s assuasive, holy ends!
But thou art faithful, father, and sincere ;
And. in thy brain the love of me shall dwell
Like the memorial music in the curved sea-shell.
170 IN THE SHADOWS.
OR Y¥..
f Rom my sick-bed gazing upon the west,
Where all the bright effulgencies of day
Lay steeped in sunless vapors, raw and gray, —
Herein (methought) is mournfully exprest
The end of false ambitions, sullen doom
Of my brave hopes, Promethean desires :
Barren and perfumeless, my name expires
Like summer-day setting in joyless gloom.
Yet faint I not in sceptical dismay,
Upheld by the belief that all pure thought
Is deathless, perfect: that the truths outwrought
By the laborious mind cannot decay,
Being evolutions of that Sovereign Mind
,
Akin to man’s; yet orbed, exhaustless, undefined. »
IN THE SHADOWS. 171
XVI. °
"TRE daisy-flower is to the summer sweet,
Though utterly unknown it live and die ;
The spheral harmony were incomplete
Did the dewed laverock mount no more the sky,
Because her music’s linked sorcery
Bewitched no mortal heart to heavenly mood.
This is the law of nature, that the deed
Should dedicate its excellence to God,
And in so doing find sufficient meed.
Then why should I make these heart-burning cries
In sickly rhyme with morbid feeling rife,
For fame and temporal felicities ?
Forgetting that in holy labor lies
The scholarship severe of human life.
172 IN THE SHADOWS.
XVII.
() GOD, it is a terrible thing to die
Into the inextinguishable life ;
To leave this known world with a feeble cry,
All its poor jarring and ignoble strife.,
O that some shadowy spectre would disclose
The Future, and the soul’s confineless hunger
Satisfy with some knowledge of repose ! |
For here the lusts of avarice waxeth stronger,
Making life hateful ; youth alone is true,
Full of a glorious self-forgetfulness :
Better to die inhabiting the new
Kingdom of faith and promise, and confess,
Even in the agony and last eclipse,
Some revelation of the Apocalypse !
IN THE SHADOWS. 173
XVIHTI.
7 Ae in his day that heathen emperor,
To whom, each morrow, came a slave, and cried,
Philip, remember thou must die’’ : no more.
To me such daily voice were misapplied, —
Disease guests with me ; and each cough, or cramp,
Or aching, like the Macedonian slave,
Is my memento mori. ’T is the stamp
Of God’s true life to be in dying brave.
‘‘T fear not death, but dying,” * — not the long
Hereafter, sweetened by immortal love ;
But the quick, terrible last breath, — the strong
Convulsion. O, my Lord of breath above!
Grant me a quiet suk in easeful rest, —
A sweet removal, on my mother’s breast.
* This is a saying of Socrates.
‘174 IN THE SHADOWS.
XIX. oe
()oPOBER’S gold is dim, — the forests rot,
The weary rain falls ceaseless, while the day
Is wrapped in damp. In mire of village way
The hedge-row leaves are stamped, and, all forgot,
The broodless nest sits visible in the thorn.
Autumn, among her drooping marigolds,
Weeps all her garnered sheaves, and empty folds,
And dripping orchards, — plundered and forlorn.
The season is a dead one, and I die !
No more, no more for me the spring, shall make
A resurrection in the earth, and take
The death from out her heart — O God, I die!
The cold throat-mist creeps nearer, till I breathe
Corruption. Drop, stark night, upon my death !
IN THE SHADOWS. 175
XX.
tee down, O dismal day! and let me live.
7 And come, blue deeps! magnificently strewn
_ With colored clouds — large, light, and fugitive —
ig By upper winds through pompous motions blown.
Now it is death in life, —a vapor dense | .
Creeps round my window till I cannot see
The far snow-shining mountains, and the glens
- Shagging the mountain-tops. O God! make free
This barren, shackled earth, so deadly cold, —
Breathe gently forth Thy spring, till winter flies
In rude amazement, fearful and yet bold,
While she performs her customed charities.
I weigh the loaded hours till life is bare —
O God! for one clear day, a snowdrop, and sweet
Bair |
176 ha IN THE SHADOWS.
XXI.
COMETIMES, when sunshine and blue sky pre- ©
vail, —
When spent winds sleep, and, from the budding
larch,
Small birds, with incomplete, vague sweetness, hail 3
The unconfirmed yet quickening life of March, cm
Then say I to myself, half-eased of care,
Toying with hope as with a maiden’s token, —
“This glorious, invisible fresh air
Will clear my blood till the disease be broken.”
But slowly, from the wild and infinite west,
Up-sails a cloud, full-charged with bitter sleet.
The omen gives my spirit much unrest ;
I fling aside the hope, as indiscreet, —
A false enchantment, treacherous and fair, —
'And sink into my habit of despair.
ba
i
to IN THE SHADOWS. 177
XXTl.
*
() WINTER! wilt thou never, never go?
O Summer! but I weary for thy coming ;
Longing ae more to hear the Luggie flow,
And frugal bees laboriously humming.
Now, the Petey iid disdasos-the infirm,.
And I must crouch in corners from rough weather.
Sometimes a winter sunset is a charm, —
When the fired clouds, compacted, blaze together,
And the large sun dips, red, behind the hills.
I, from my window, can behold this pleasure ;
And the eternal moon, what time she fills
Her orb with argent, treading a soft measure,
With queenly motion of a bridal mood,
Through the white spaces of infinitude.
8 * L
178 IN THE SHADOWS.
XXII.
() BEAUTIFUL moon! 0 beautiful moon! again
Thou persecutest me until I bend
My brow, and soothe the aching of my brain.
I cannot see what handmaidens attend
Thy silver passage as the heaven clears ;
For, like a slender mist, a sweet vexation
Works in my heart, till the impulsive tears
Confess the bitter pain of adoration.
O, too, too beautiful moon! lift the white shell
Of thy soft splendor through the shining air !
I own the magic power, the witching spell,
And, blinded by thy beauty, call thee fair !
Alas! not often now thy silver horn
Shall me delight with dreams and mystic love
forlorn !
IN THE SHADOWS. 179
XXIV.
i ia IS April, yet the wind retains its tooth.
I cannot venture in the biting air,
‘But sit and feign wild trash and dreams uncouth,
“< Stretched on the rack of a too-easy chair.’’
And when the day has howled itself to sleep,
The lamp is lighted in my little room ;
And lowly, as the tender lapwings creep,
Comes my own mother, with her love’s perfume.
O living sons with living mothers! learn
Their worth, and use them gently, with no
chiding ;
For youth, I know, is quick ; of temper stern
Sometimes; and apt to blunder without guiding. |
So was I long, but now I see her move,
Transfigured in the radiant mist of love.
180 IN THE SHADOWS.
AXV:
|ESee awake at holy eventide,
While in clear mournfulness the throstle’s hymn
Hashes the night, and the great west grown dim
Laments the sunset’s evanescent pride :
Lo! I behold an orb of silver brightly
Grow from the fringe of sunset, like a dream
From Thought’s severe infinitude, and nightly
Show forth God’s glory in its sacred gleam.
Ah, Hesper! maidenliest star that ere
Twinkled in firmament ! coe! gloaming’s prime
Cheerer, whose fairness maketh wondrous fair .
Old pastorals, and the Spenserian rhyme : —
Thy soft seduction doth my soul enthral
Like music, with a dying, dying fall!
wr. ee
BE @rasy og,
IN. THE. SHADOWS. 181
XXXVI.
| Beer are three bonnie Scottish melodies,
| So native to the music of my soul,
That of its humors they ie prophecies.
The ravishment of Chaucer was less whole,
Less perfect, when the April nightingale
Let itself in upon him. Surely, Lord!
Before whom psaltery and clarichord,
_ Concentual with saintly song, prevail,
There lurks some subtle sorcery, to Thee
And heaven akin, in each woe-burning air !
Land of the Leal, and Bonnie Bessie Lee,
And Home nen Home, the lilt of love’s despair.
Now, in remembrance even, the feelings speak,
For lo! a shower of grace is on my cheek.
182 IN THE SHADOWS.
XXVIII.
“Thou art wearin’ awa’, Jean, —
Like snaw when it’s thaw, Jean 5
Thou art wearin’ awa”
To the land o’ the leal.” —Oxp Sona.
() THE impassable sorrow, mother mine!
Of the sweet, mournful air which, clear and well,
For me fod singest! Never the divine
Aaron es harper, famous Israfel,
Such rich enchanting luxury of woe
Elicited from all his golden strings !
Therefore, dear singer sad! chant clear, and low,
And lovingly, the bard’s imaginings.
O poet unknown! conning thy verses o'er
In lone, dim places, sorrowfully sweet ;
And.O musician! touching the quick core
Of pity, when thy skilful closes meet, —
My tears confess your witchery as they flow,
Since I, too, wear away like the unenduring snow.
Mey a em
IN THE SHADOWS. 183 _
oo in unparticipated night
O indefinable Being! far retired
From mortal ken in uncreated light:
While demonstrating glories unacquired
When shall the wavering sciences evolve.
The infinite secret, Theg? What mind shall scan
The tenor of Thy workmanship, or solve
The dark, perplexing destiny of man?
O, in the hereafter boarder-land of wonder,
Shall the proud world’s inveterate tale be told,
The curtain of all mysteries torn asunder,
The cerements from the living soul unrolled ?
Impatient questioner, soon, soon shall death
Reveal to thee these dim phantasmata of faith.
184 IN THE SHADOWS.
XXIX. °
Ne thus proceeds the mode of human life
From mystery to mystery again ;
From God to God, through grandeur, grief, and strife,
A hurried plunge into the dark inane |
Whence had we lately sprung. And is’t forever?
Ah! sense is blind beyond the gaping clay,
And all the eyes of faith can see it never.
We know the bright-haired sun will bring the
day,
Like glorious book of silent prophecy ;
Majestic night assume her starry throne ;
The wondrous seasons come and go: but we
Die, and to mortal ken forever gone.
Who shall pry further? who shall kindle light
‘ In the dread bosom of the infinite ?
aha a en,
eee
IN THE SHADOWS. 185
XXX.
() THOU of purer eyes than to behold
Uncleanness ! sift my soul, removing all
Strange thoughts, imaginings fantastical,
Iniquitous allurements manifold.
Make it a Spiritual ark ; abode
Severely sacred, perfumed, sanctified,
Wherein the Prince of Purities may abide, —
The holy and eternal Spirit of God.
The gross, adhesive loathsomeness of sin,
Give me to see. Yet, O far more, far more,
That beautiful purity which the saints adore
In a consummate Paradise within
The Veil, —O Lord, upon my soul bestow,
An earnest of that purity here below.
>
186 IN THE SHADOWS.
MY EPITAPH,
x
BEL OW lies one whose name was traced in sartd.
He died, not knowing what it was to live: |
Died, while the Jirst sweet consciousness of ananhood
To maiden thought electrified his soul,
Faint heatings in the calyx of the rose.
Bewildered reader! pass without a sigh,
Ina proud sorrow! There is life with God
In other kingdom of a sweeter air.
In Eden every flower ts blown: AmEn.
ap od , 5 Zs
‘ s
4
r ‘
* Sy ie
.
{
t
f MA
‘
»
'
Pe.
Se Abed
Jo
Fa
if
POEMS NAMED AND WITHOUT NAMES.
; 1A) HE evening now is still and calm,
WALI Sy
INS
As if sad Eloisa’s soul
Had breathed a spiritual balm
Throughout the softened whole.
Within the azure of the sky
There shineth not a single star ;
But in a soft serenity
The Crescent cometh from afar.
In darker lines the firs that shade .
The house of Merkland round and round,
Come out, and from the fragrant glade
No liquid notes resound :
I heard the birds this livelong day,
In sweet unwrinkled blending,
190 POEMS NAMED AND
As if this merry month of May
Should never have an ending.
O could I utter thoughts that rise, »
O could I sing the tender
Softness of the summer skies, F
In all their virgin splendor !
O crescent Moon, like pearléd bark —
To ferry souls to glory ;
O silent deepening of the dark
O’er vale and promontory! —
Alas, that I should live, and be
A churl in soul, while slowly
God makes the fearful eve, and breathes
A calm through hearts unholy !
_ WITHOUT NAMES. 191
O COOL the summer woods
Of dear Gartshore, where bloom
Soft clouds of white anemones
Among their own perfume.
- And clear the little brooklet,
Singing an endless lay,
Winding its nameless waters
Close by the white highway.
And here in sweet sensation,
And soul-uneasy swoon,
I’ve lain for many a golden
Hour of a summer noon.
The cushats crooned around me
Their hoarse and amorous song ;
And in a brooding drowsiness,
The echoes swooned along;
192
POEMS NAMED AND
Till all the sweet sensations
Gree into utter pain,
And I was fain to wander
Sadly home again.
There have been brotherhoods in song,
And human friendships ever true ;
There have been ita unto death,
Yes, and right many too.
But never in the march of time,
And never in all mortal knowing,
From history or nobler rhyme,
Hath there been such a constant flowing :
One from mountains far away,
One from glades of emerald shining,
Flowing, flowing evermore
For a delicate combining.
If upon a summer’s day,
When the air is blue and bracing,
‘You for Merkland take your way,
Sweet uneasy fancies chasing ;
a
WITHOUT NAMES.
¢
You may see the famous grove —
If not famous, then most surely
Ripe for fame, which is but love —
Where they mingle most demurely.
Not in song and babbling play
Which no poet could unravel ;
But in tender, simple way,
On a bed of golden gravel.
‘Where I sit I see them now, —
Bothlin with her endless winding
From a mountain’s purple brow,
Sacred contemplation finding ;
In still nooks of shady rest,
Gleaming greenly ’neath the holly:
Youth, she says, is often blest
With a little melancholy.
Luggie from the orient fields
Wiser is, yet hath a beauty,
Which the snowy conscience yields .
To the softened face of duty.
9
193
194 POEMS NAMED AND
All she does bespeaks a grace,
Yet the grace hath that of sadness
We behold in many a face,
Where we had expected gladness.
But when Bothlin meets her there,
See the change to sudden glory !
Surely such another pair
Never met in classic story.
I could sing for half a day,
And my spirit, never weary,
Fashioning the vernal lay
With a linnet’s impulse cheery.
But some night in leafy June,
You the place yourself may see ;
When the light is in the moon,
Like the passion that’s in me.
_ WITHOUT NAMES.
THE ANEMONE.
I HAVE wandered far to-day,
In a pleased unquiet way ;
Over hill and songful hollow,
Vernal byways, fresh and fair, |
Did I simple fancies follow ;
Till, upon a hillside bare,
Suddenly I chanced to see
A little white anemone.
Beneath a clump of furze it grew ;
And never mortal eye did view
Its.rathe and slender beauty, till
I saw it in no mocking mood ;
For with its sweetness did it fill
To me the ample solitude.
A fond remembrance made me see
Strange light in the anemone.
195
196
POEMS NAMED AND
eetan
One April day when I was seven,
Beneath the clear and decpouine heaven,
My father, God preserve him! went _
With me a Scottish mile and more;
And in a playful merriment
He decked my bonnet’ o’er and over —
To fling a sunshine on his ease —
With tenderest anemones.
Now, gentle reader, as I live,
This snowy little bloom did give
' My being most endearing throes.
I saw my father in his prime ;
But youth it comes, and youth it goes, ~
And he has spent his blithest time :
Yet dearer grown through all to me,
And dearer the anemone.
So with the spirit of a sage
I plucked it from its hermitage,
|
|
.
WITHOUT NAMES.
And placed it ’tween the sacred leaves
Of Agnes’ Eve at that rare part
Where she her fragrant robe unweaves,
And with a gently beating heart,
In troubled bliss and balmy woe,
Lies down to dream of Porphyro.
Let others sing of that and this,
In war and science find their bliss ;
Vainly they seek and will not find
The subtle lore that nature brings
Unto the reverential mind, :
The pathos worn by common things,
By every flower that lights the lea,
And by the pale anemone.
197
198
POEMS NAMED AND
jg night a vision was dispelled,
Which I can never dream again ;
A itt from the earth has gone,
A passion from my brain.
I saw upon a budding ash
A cuckoo, and she blithely sung.
To all the valleys round about,
While on a branch she swung.
Cuckoo, cuckoo: I looked around,
And like a dream fulfilled,
A slender bird of modest brown,
My sight with wonder thrilled.
I looked again, and yet again ;
My eyes, thought I, do sure deceive ae
But when belief made doubting vain,
Alas, the sight did grieve me.
WITHOUT NAMES. .
For twice Pease I heard the cry,
The hollow cry of melting love ;
And twice a tear bedimmed my eye. —
I saw the singer in the grove,
I saw him pipe his ee tone,
Like any other common bird,
And, as I live, the sovereign cry
Was not the one I always heard.
O why within that lusty wood
Did I the fairy sight behold?
O why within that solitude
Was I thus blindly overbold ?
My heart, forgive me! for indeed
I cannot speak my thrilling pain :
The wonder vanished from the earth,
The passion from my brain.
199.
200
POEMS NAMED AND
THE YELLOWHAMMER.
ibe! fairy glen of Woodilee,
One sunny summer morning,
I plucked a little birchen tree,
The spongy moss adorning ;
And bearing it delighted home,
I planted it in garden loam,
_ Where, perfecting all duty,
It flowered in tasselled beauty.
When delicate April in each dell
Was silently completing
Her ministry in bud and bell,
To grace the summer’s meeting ;
My birchen tree of glossy rind
Determined not to be behind ;
So with a subtle power
The buds began to flower.
on
WITHOUT NAMES. A
And I could watch from out my house
The twigs with leaflets thicken ;
From glossy rind to twining boughs
The milky sap ’gan quicken.
And when the fragrant form was green
No fairer tree was to be seen,
All Gartshore woods adorning,
Where doves are always mourning.
But never dove with liquid wing,
Or neck of changeful gleaming,
Came near my garden tree to sing
Or croodle out its meaning.
_ But this sweet day, an hour ago,
A yellowhammer, clear and low,
In love and tender pity
Thrilled out his dainty ditty.
And I was pleased, as you may think,
And blessed the little singer :
9 *
202:
POEMS NAMED AND
‘‘O fly for your mate to cee brink,
Dear little bird! and bring her ;
And build your nest among the boughs,
A sweet and cosey little house
Where ye may well content ye,
Since true love is so plenty.
‘‘ And when she sits upon her Ayah
Here are cool shades to shroud her.’’
At this the singer sang his best,
O louder yet, and louder ;
Until I shouted in my glee,
His song had so enchanted me.
No nightingale could pant on
In joy so wise and wanton.
But at my careless noise he flew,
And if he chance to bring her
A happy bride the summer through
*Mong birchen boughs to linger,
WITHOUT NAMES. . — 203
I’ll sing to you in numbers high
A summer song that shall not die,
But keep in memory clearly
The bird I love so dearly.
204
POEMS NAMED AND
SNOW.
roe upon the summer lea,
Daisies, kingcups, pale primroses, —
These are sung from sea to sea,
As many a darling rhyme discloses.
Tangled wood and hawthorn dale
In many a songful snatch prevail ;
But never yet, as well I mind,
In all their verses can I find
A simple tune, with quiet flow,
To match the falling of the snow.
O weary passed each winter day,
And windily howled each winter night ;
O miry grew each village way,
And mists enfolded every height ;
And ever on the window-pane
A froward gust blew down with rain,
WITHOUT NAMES. 205
And day by day in tawny brown
The Luggie stream came heaving down : —
I could have fallen asleep and dreamed
Until again spring sunshine gleamed.
And what! said I, is this the mode
That Winter kings it now-a-days ?
The Robin keeps his own abode,
And pipes his independent lays.
I’ve seen the day Piaterkiand hill,
That snow has fallen with a will,
Even in November! Now, alas!
The whole year round we see the grass : —
Ah, winter now may come’and go
Without a single fall of snow.
It was the latest day but one
Of winter, as I questioned thus ;
And sooth! an angry mood was on,
As at a thing most scandalous ; —
206
POEMS NAMED AND
When lo! some hailstones on the pane
With sudden tinkle rang amain,
Till in an ecstasy of joy
I clapped and shouted like a boy, —
O, rain may come and rain may go, _
But what can match the falling snow !
It draped the naked sycamore
On Foordcroft hill, above the well ;
The elms of Rosebank o’er and o’er
Were silvered richly as it fell.
The distant Campsie peaks were lost,
And farthest Criftin with his host
Of gloomy pine-trees disappeared,
Nor even a lonely ridge upreared. —
O, rain may come and rain may go,
But what can match the falling snow !
Afar upon the Solsgirth moor,
Hach heather sprig of withered brown
_ WITHOUT. NAMES. | 207
Is fringed with thread of silver pure
As slow the soft flakes waver down;
And on Glenconner’s lonely path,
And Gartshore’s still and open strath,
It falleth, quiet as the birth
Of morning o’er the quickening earth. —
O, rain may come and rain may go,
But what can match the falling snow!
And all around our Merkland home
| Is laid a sheet of virgin lawn ;
On fairer, softer, ne’er did roam
The nimble Oread or Faun.
There is a wonder in the air,
A living beauty everywhere ;
As if the whole had ne’er been planned,
But touched by Merlin’s famous wand,
Suddenly woke beneath his hand
To potent bliss in fairy show —
A mighty ravishment.of snow !
208 POEMS NAMED AND
Fore FROST, old Nature’s jeweller, had beauti-
fied the leas,
And the lustre of his fretwork was twinkling on
the trees,
As we rambled o’er the meadows in a meditative ease.
We had left the town behind us for a roaming
holiday,
Beneath an arc of gloom, all dark and indistinct it lay,
And the fog was wreathed about it like a robe of
iron-gray.
But a carpeting of leaflets, and a canopy of blue,
And the mystery of ether as the warming sunshine
grew,
Sent a mellow thrill of happiness our eager spirits
through.
2 a
WITHOUT NAMES. —__—-.09
' And over Janes, where Winter bluff had shook his
hoary beard,
Where in the naked hedgerows the broodless nests
appeared, 3
And the brown leaves of the beech-tree were with
silver gloss veneered.
We wandered and we B eldered till half the morn
was spent,
And the red orb through the tangled boughs his
cunning vigor sent,
‘And the valley mists all melted at his glance om-
nipotent.
Dim on a sloping hillside, clothed in a misty pall,
Stands a turret gray and hoary, where the ancient
ivies crawl,
Their Arab arms round casement, sill, and door,
and mould’ring wall.
2 |
210 POEMS NAMED AND
And there we halted half an hone within a roofless”
Shall
’Neath a bower of wildest ivy hanging downwards
from the wall,
Bearing in its grand luxuriance a flower fune-
real.
There we talked of the gay plumes erst bent to
pass the lintel old,
The maidens that were moved to smile at gallant
wooers bold,
The jovial nights of brave carouse, the wine-cups
manifold.
And all the faded glories of the medizval time,
When the age was in its manhood, and the tae
was in its prime,
And manly deeds were chanted in a bold heroic
rhyme.
WITHOUT NAMES. | 211
Then, plucking each a sprig, bedecked with simple
yellow flower,
We scrambled sadly downwards from our old en-
| Syactid ie ?
And the glory of the sunshine fell upon us like
. a shower.
Once more beneath the concave of a clear effulgent
‘sky,
Where flocks of cawing rooks to the mansion
wavered by, —
A mansion standing coldly ’mid a windy rookery.
And over breezy mountains, where the poacher,
with his gun,
Stood lonely as a bowlder-stone, ’tween earth and
shining sun,
We wandered and we pondered till the winter day
was done.
212.
POEMS NAMED AND
(Oz many a leaf will fall to-night,
As she wanders through the wood !
And many an angry gust will break
The dreary solitude.
I wonder if she’s past the bridge,
Where Luggie moans beneath ;
While rain-drops clash in planted te
On rivulet and heath.
Disease hath laid his palsied palm
Upon my aching brow ; 3
The headlong blood of twenty-one
Ts thin and sluggish now.
’T is nearly ten! A fearful night,
Without a single star
To light the shadow on her soul
With sparkle from afar:
WITHOUT NAMES. 213
The moon is canopied with clouds,
And her burden it.is cote ;—
What would wee Jackie do, if he
Should never see her more ?
Ay, light the lamp, and hang it up
At the window fair and free ;
*T will be a beacon on the hill
To let your mother see.
And trim it well, my little Ann,
For the night is wet and cold,
And you know the weary, winding way
Across the miry wold.
All drenched will be her simple gown,
And the wet will reach her skin:
I wish that I could wander down,
And the red quarry win, —
To take the burden from her back,
And place it upon mine ;
With words of cheerful condolence,
Not uttered to repine.
214° POEMS NAMED. AND
You have a kindly mother, dears,
As ever bore a child, |
And Heaven knows I love her well
In passion undefiled.
Ah me! I never thought that she
Would brave a night like this,
While I sat weaving by the fire
A web of fantasies.
How the winds beat this home of ours
With arrow-falls of rain ;
This lonely home upon the hill
They beat with might and main.
And ’mid the tempest one lone heart
Anticipates the glow,
Whence, all her weary journey done,
Shall happy welcome flow.
’T is after ten! O, were she here,
Young man although I be,
I could fall down upon her neck,
And weep right gushingly !
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216 POEMS NAMED AND
“ Happy child !
Thou art $0 exquisitely wild,
I think of thee with many tears,
For what may be thy lot in future years.”
WoRDSWORTH.
pee goldening peach on the orchard wall,
Soft feeding in the sun,
Hath never so downy and rosy a cheek
As this laughing little one.
The brook that murmurs and dimples alone
Through glen, and grove, and lea,
Hath never a life so merry and true
As my brown little brother of three.
From flower to flower, and from bower to bower,
In my mother’s garden green,
A-peering at this, and a-cheering at that,
The funniest ever was seen ; —
Now throwing himself in his mother’s lap,
With his cheek upon her breast,
WITHOUT NAMES.
He tells his wonderful travels, forsooth !
And chatters himself to rest.
And what may become of that brother of mine,
Asleep in his mother’s bosom ?
Will the wee rosy bud of his being, at last
Into a wild-flower blossom ?
Will the hopes that are deepening as silent and fair
As the azure about his ee
Be told in glory and motherly pride,
Or answered with a sigh ?
Let the curtain rest: for, alas! ’tis told
That Mercy’s hand betign
Hath woven and spun the gossamer thread
That forms the fabric so fine.
Then dream, dearest Jackie! thy sinless dream,
And waken as blithe and as free ;
There ’s many a change in twenty long years,
My brown little brother of three.
10
218 POEMS NAMED AND
yun sycamores of wondrous fairness smooth,
And mealy green of trunk, and murmurous_
In multitudinous sun-twinkling leaves,
This valley grace. Three fairer than the rest,
Which in the silent worship of my heart 2
I fondly call the brothers of Bridgend,
O’er cottage floors when doors are wide for heat,
And often on the face of cradled child,
Throw dusky shadows. And when lenient winds
Blow motion, the cool shadows flicker and play
Upon the floors, and glimpse the countenance
Of the sweet baby, till the mother laughs,
And bending downward, kisses. But of all
The trees that ever tufted hill or vale,
That ever took the breeze or sheltered nest,
Or rung with flowing melody of birds,
The strangest and the dearest, best and first,
_ WITHOUT NAMES. 219
Waves audibly upon a windy hill.
Above the Luggie. In the front of Spring,
When the first oes gleams among the grass,
| “One half shines out full-leaved, the other bare :
And when the Autumn Pickles hath lost
_ Its fragrance, and the meadow-hay is mown,
One half shines out full-leaved, the other bare.
It is two trees, whose marriageable boughs
Twine each with each and throw a common shade,
A chestnut and anelm. The former opes
Its oily buds whene’er the teeming south
| Breathes life and warm intenerating balm,
But woe in early Autumn; while supreme
In vigorous development, the elm
Full-foliaged glimmers till October’s end.
At the twin roots, and facing the rich west,
A summer seat is rustically carved,
A sylvan shelter from the midday sun:
But nor in midday nor when decent eve
Gathers her purples have I rested there ;
220 POEMS NAMED AND
But when through crisp and fleecy clouds the
moon : |
O’er the soft orient sheds a milder dawn.
Then tripping up the dewy lea, with step
Light as an antelope, a maiden came,
And all her radiance in my bosom laid ; ;
And on this seat, while high among the leaves
Rain murmured, and the glory of the moon
Was dimmed, I whispered all my passion tale.
Ah me! ah me! her silken hair downslid,
Her smooth comb dropt among the grass, and
both
Stooped searching, and her burning cheek met
mine :
And starting sudden upward, with her face
Rosed to the beating temples, meek she gazed,
Half sad, and the blue languish of her eyes
Drooped tearful. And in madness and delight,
I with my left arm zoned her little waist,
And with my right hand smoothed the silken hair
WITHOUT NAMES. 921
From her fair brow, snow cold; and, by the doves
That bill and coo in Venus’ pearly car!
There was a touch of lips. Then creeping close
Into my bosom like a little thing
That was confused, she cgadled pantingly.
Thus, while the rain was murmuring overhead,
And the out-passioned moon through vaporous
gloom |
Dipt queenly, whispered I my perilous tale.
Ah me! ah me! a tender answer came :
For with her softling finger-tips she touched
My hand, warm laid upon her heart, and pressed,
A meek approval with averted face.
O poet maker, darling love, sweet love,
Awakener of manhood and the life
Of life! But let me not like talking fool
Prate all thy virgin whiteness, all thy sweet
Deliciousness, for thou art living yet!
And as the rose that opens to the sun
Its downy leaves, scents sweetest at the core,
992 POEMS NAMED AND
So all thy loveliness is but the robe
That clothes a maiden chastity of soul.
O hasten, hasten down your azure road,
And darken all the golden.zones of heaven,
¢ Bright Sun, for I am weary for my love.
223
G WHET Muse and well-beloved, with my decline
Declining, like a rose crushed unawares,
_ Having too early knowledge of decay,
x! Too subtle pleasure to behold the tree
Shed its thin foliage on the: sluggish stream, —
What a sweet subject for thy silver sounds!
O for a quill plucked from the soaring wing
Of archangel, then dipt'in holy dew,
To énich thy latest looks, thou loveliest
October, o’er the many-colored woods!
October ! vastlier disconsolate
Than Saturn guiding melancholy spheres,
Through ante-mundane silence and ripe death.
Ere the last stack is housed, and woods are bare,
And the vermilion fruitage of the brier
224 POEMS NAMED AND | “
Is soaked in mist, or shrivelled up with frost ;
Ere warm Spring nests are coldly to be seen
Tenantless, but for rain and the cold snow, |
While yet there is a loveliness abroad, —
The frail and indescribable loveliness
Of a fair form Life with reluctance leaves,
Being there only powerful, — while the earth
Wears sackcloth in her great prophetic grief: —
,
J
iy
Then the reflective melancholy soul, —
Aimlessly wandering with slow falling foot
The heath’ry solitude, in hope to assuage
The cunning humor of his malady, —
Loses his painful bitterness, and feels
His own specific sorrows one by one
Taken up in the huge dolor of all things.
3
O the sweet melancholy of the time
When gently, ere the heart appeals, the year
Shines in thé fatal beauty of decay !
Te eS te ee ne -_ NG an
me WITHOUT NAMES. 295
When the sun sinks enlarged on Carronben,
Nakedly visible without a cloud, |
And faintly from the faint StariiAl ate
(That dim, sweet harebell-color) comes the star
Which evening wears ;— when Luggie flows in
: mist,
And in the cottage windows, one by one,
With sudden twinkle household lamps are lit,
What noiseless falling of the faded leaf!
Sweet on a blossoming summer’s afternoon,
When Fancy plays the wizard in the brain,
Idly to saunter through a lusty wood !
But sweeter far— by how much sweeter, God
Alone hath knowledge — in a pensive mood,
Outstretched on green moss-velvet flossed with
7 thyme, ,
To watch the fall o’ the leaf before the moon
Shines out in sweet completion aeotlak
For when the Sunset hath withdrawn its gold
10* oO
226. POEMS NAMED AND WITHOL
And tawny glimmering, like the surcease- =
Of rich, low melody, erst inaudible streams —
Find voices in their still unwearied flow ;
mina winds that have been much about the micere
And mountains, have a deadly feel of cold,
Forespeaking clear blue dawns and frosty chill.
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\@ LIME-TREE broad of bough and rough of
trunk
Deepens a shadow, as the evening cool,
Over the Luggie gathering in deep pool
Contemplative, its waters summer-shrunk ;
The Lammas floods have sucked away the mould
About its roots, and now in bare sunshine
Like knot of snakes they twine and intertwine
Fantastic implication, fold in fold.
Secure in covert, neath the is fern
_ Lurks the bright-speckled trout, untroubled, save
When boyhood with a glorious unconcern
Eagerly plunges in the sleeping wave.
Here the much-musing poet might recapture
The inspiration flown, the vagrant rapture.
230 MISCELLANEOUS SONNETS.
II.
FF Z5KIL, thus from the Lord God. Behold,
Mount Seir, I am against thee! Desolate,
Most desolate thy cloudy and dark fate.
Between the lips of talkers bad and bold,
Thy towns forsaken, and thy rivers rolled
Through silent wastes, are taken up, and great ;
The joy at thy high glories ruinate. :
While all the earth is wanton, thou art cold,
For thy most cruel lifting of the spear —
’Gainst Israel in her time of consternation.
Slain'men shall fill thy mountains, O mount Seir 7 EN q
e
Sith thou hast blood pursued, fell tribulation
oe
oa
Shall curse thy blessings, mocked and unde-
plored : — |
As I live, thou shalt know I am the Lord!
MISCELLANEOUS SONNETS. 231
LY.
G yearnings had my soul to gaze upon
Fair Italy with atmosphere of fire ;
On tawny Spain; on th’ immemorial land
Where Time has dallied with the Parthenon
In beautiful affection A desire.
But when last even, Situently bland,
: I saw sweet Luggie wind her amber waters
Thro’ lawns of dew and glens of Bianeine green,
: And saw the comeliness of Scotland’s daughters,
Their speaking eyes and modest mountain mien, —
_I blest the Godhead over all presiding,
Who placed me here, removed from human strife,
Where Luggie, in her clear, unwearied gliding,
Is but the image of my inner life.
232 “MISCELLANEOUS SONNETS.
IV.
%
Geet Mavis! at this cool delicious hour
Of gloaming, when a pensive quietness
Hushes the odorous air, — with what a power |
}
Fe
4
4
.
Of impulse unsubdued, thou dost express
Thyself a spirit! While the silver dew
Holy as manna on the meadow falls,
Thy song’s impassioned clarity, trembling through
This omnipresent stillness, disenthralls |
The soul to adoration. First I heard
A low, thick lubric gurgle, soft as love,
Yet sad as memory, through the silence poured
Like starlight. But the mood intenser grows,
Precipitate rapture quickens, move on move
Lucidly linked together, till the close.
NE ee ae ee a ee ee ee ee a ee ee aes
MISCELLANE OUS SONNETS. 233 |
Vv.
() DEEP unlovely brooklet, moaning slow
| Through moorish fen in, utter loneliness !
The partridge cowers beside thy loamy flow
In pulseful tremor, when with sudden press
The huntsman fluskers though the rustled heather.
In March thy sallow-buds from vermeil shells
Break satin-tinted, Angie as the feather
‘ Of moss-chat that among the purplish bells
Breasts into fresh new life her three unborn.
The plover hovers o’er thee, uttering clear —
And mournful — strange, his human cry forlorn:
“While wearily, alone, and void of cheer
_ Thou guid’st thy nameless waters fron the fen,
To sleep unsunned in an untrampled glen. —
234 MISCELLANEOUS SONNETS.
Vi
AW ySRe what a calm serenity she smooths
Her way throu ch cloudless jasper sown with stars !
Chaster than virtue, sweeter than the traths
Of maidenhood, in Spenser’s knightly se
For what is all Belphcebe’s golden hair,
. The chastity of Britomart, the love
Of Florimel so faithful and so fair,
To thee, thou Wonder! And yet far above
Thy inoffensive beauty must I hold
Dear Una, sighing for the Red-cross Knight
Through all her losses, crosses manifold. —
And when the lordly lion fell in fight,
Who, who can paragon her tearful woe ?
Not thou, not thou, O Moon! didst ever passion so.
MISCELLANEOUS SONNETS. 235
ao
*
Vi.
() PRECIOUS Morphia! I sanctify
The soothing power that in a painless swoon
Laps my weak limbs, giving me strength to lie,
Till sacred dawn increases until noon:
ete het fom his meridional height,
The sun devolves, oan cooling Peeeres wake,
It is a comfort and divine delight
The weary bed exhausted to forsake,
And bathe my temples in the blessed air.
But when day wanes and the wind-moaning night
Deepens to darkness, then thy virtue rare,
O dream-creative liquid! brings delight,
Thy silver drops diffusive, kindly steep
The senses in the golden juice of sleep.
s Yate ee
Naas ,
236 MISCELLANEOUS SONNETS. :
‘ VIII.
(eae light-foot Lady! from thy vaporous hall, .
And, with a silver-swim into the air,
Shine down the starry cressets one and all
From Pleiades to golden Jupiter!
' I see a growing tip of silver peep
@ 3
Above the full-fed cloud, and lo! with motion’ —
Of queenly stateliness, and smooth as sleep,
She glides into the blue for my devotion.
O sovran Beauty! standing here alone
Under the insufferable infinite,
I Be te with dazed eyes and feeble moan
Thy lucid persecution of delight.
Come, cloudy dimness! Dip, fair dream, again !
‘QO God! I cannot gaze, for utter pain.
MISCELLANEOUS SONNETS. 237
IX.
MAIDENHOOD.
*
A SAORED land, to common men unknown,
A land of bowery clades and siesnwoodd hoary,
Still waters where white) stars reflected shone,
And ancient castles in their ivied glory.
Fair knights caparisoned in golden mail,
And maidens whose enchantment was their beauty,
Met but to whisper each the passion-tale,
For love was all their pleasure and their duty.
Here cedar bark, as with a moving will,
Floated through liquid silver all.untended ;
Here wrong and baseness ever came to ill,
And virtue with delight was sweetly blended.
This land, dear Spenser! was thy fair creation,
Made through fine glamour of imagination.
238 MISCELLANEOUS SONNETS.
X.
pAcieLts singeth over golden sand ;
Scamander, old and blood-empurpled river,
Rolls yet her divine waters ; Castaly_
Flows lucid in the light of ancient song ;
Whilst thou, sweet Luggie! fairest of this land,
And fair as any of that famous throng,
In pastoral, still loveliness, must be
Bald as a marshy brooklet nameless ever !
Nay, by the spirit of beauty and dear pleasure, —
Sure I shall sing thee as my first delight,
Nurse of my soul, companion of my leisure !
... And if in aftertime thy waters roll
More worthily, more spiritually bright,
It will be sunshine to my perfect soul.
MISCELLANEOUS SONNETS. 239
XI.
() FOR the days of sweet Mythology,
When dripping Naiads taught their streams to glide!
When, ’mid the greenery, one would ofttimes spy
| An Oread tripping with her face aside.
The dismal realms of Dis by Virgil sung,
Whose shade led Dante, in his virtue bold,
All the sad grief and agony among,
-O’er Weteton. that mournful river old,
Ev’n to the Stygian tide of purple gloom |
Pan in the forest making melody !
And far away where hoariest billows boom,
Old Neptune’s steeds with snorting nostrils high !
These were the ancient days of sunny song ;
Their memory yet how dear to the poetic throng!
Cambridge: Stereotyped and Printed by Welch, Bigelow, & Co.
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No. 143 WASHINGTON STREET,
Boston, Sept., 1864,
“Messrs, ROBERTS BROTHERS’
: List of Publications.
—
POEMS.
By JEAN INGELOW.
- Ninth Thousand. .1 vol. 316mo. Vellum and Fancy Cloth,
gilt top. Price, $1.50.
_ ~ “The new name undoubtedly belongs to a new poet, and this new volume:
will make the eyes of all lovers of poetry dance with a gladder light than if®
they had come upon a treasure-trove of gold. . . . Here is the unmistakable .
touch and breath of freshness; the clear early carol and dewy light. Here is
the presence of Genius, which cannot easily be defined, but which makes itself
surely felt in a glow of delight such as makes the old world young agam.
Here is the power to fill common earthly facts with heavenly fire ; a power to
-gladden wisely and to sadden nobly; to shake the heart, and bring moist tears
into the eyes, through which the spirit may catch its loftiest light.” — London
A theneum.
“Tt would be a great injustice to confound this volume with the mass of so-
called poetry. . . . It contains something more than commonplace thoughts
clothed in tolerably pretty words. Nor is her volume, like too many of those
of even the more tolerable verse-writers of the day, made up of a mass of com-
parative rubbish, relieved here and there by an isolated piece, to which it is not
impossible conscientiously to award praise. One of the most striking charac-
teristics of Miss Ingelow’s poems is the remarkable evenness of their quality ;
and there is nothing in her volume which may not fairly claim to be regarded
good. . . . Miss Ingelow’s volume can scarcely fail to win for itself. a warm
welcome from all lovers of true poetry, and warrants us in anticipating that she
will at some future time take a permanent place among English poets.” — Lon-
don Spectator.
2 Messrs. Roberts Brothers Ltst.
PoEMS. | 5
By. DANID *GRAwW.
With an Introductory Notice by LorpD HovuGHTon (R. M.
MiILNEs), Memoir of the Author, and Final Memorials.
rvol. 1r6mo. Vellum and Fancy Cloth, gilt top. Price, $ 1.50.
‘*T will not here assume the position of a poetical critic, both because I know
such criticism to be dreary and unsatisfactory, and because I am conscious that
‘the personal interest I took in David Gray is likely in some degree to influence
my judgment. There is in truth no critic of poetry but the man who enjoys it,
and the amount of gratification felt is the only just measure of criticism. I be-
lieve, however, that I should have found much pleasure in these Poems if I
‘had met with them accidentally, and if I had been unaware of the strange
and pathetic incidents of their production. But the public mind will not
separate the intrinsic merits of the verses from the story of the writer, any
more than the works and fate of Keats or of Chatterton ; we value all con-
@nected with the being of every true Poet, because it is the highest form of
nature that man is permitted to-study and enjoy.” — Lord Houghion (R.
M. Milnes).
‘“‘And David’s poetry? .We have said that it is yet too early to estimate
that at its true value ; but it can never be read apart from the brief story of the
writer. More than most men did David interweave his own personal joys and
sufferings with the text of his ambitious verse. He was far too self-absorbed
to possess dramatic power. His writings, however, have a pathos and an
earnestness which we frequently look for in vain in the books of greater men.”
— Robert Buchanan. .
“The poems of this ill-fated and winsome young Scotchman, heart-brother
of Robert Burns, are marked by rare tenderness and sincerity, and by that =
fascinating felicity of verbal touch which is one of the choicest characteristics |
of true genius. Such a pure and pathetic story, such lucid and breathing
poetry as we have here, are charged with a blessed ministry for a coarse and
bustling age, for a reckless utilitarian people. The feelings of love, pity, and
grief this little book is calculated to awaken will exert a salutary influence, *
‘softening the heart, nourishing human sympathy and poetic sentiment.” —
Rev, W. R. Alger
a. e
Messrs. Roberts Brothers List. 3
.
THE
POETRY OF THE EAST.
By WILLIAM ROUNSEVILLE ALGER.
rvol, zzmo. Cloth, extra. Price, $1.00.
This is a complete Introduction to Oriental Poetry. in all its
families and departments ; from the great epics of India, Persia,
and Arabia, to their innumerable varieties of lyrical, descriptive,
-and aphoristic verse. It gives a critical account of the chief
Eastern authors and their works, and illustrates them by hun-
dreds of specimens. It is the only work of the kind in our lan-
guage; and as such, no less than from its intrinsic merits, it
possesses a unique value and charm.
“Its characterizations of the different branches of Eastern poetry are re-
markably happy and accurate.” — HH. H. Wilson, late President of the Royat
Astatic Society.
“*Tt is full of wisdom and beauty.” — Fohu G. Whitier.
** Extraordinary sentences for extraordinary readers.” — Ralph Waldo Em-
erson.
“The modesty, enthusiasm, and interest of this book will keep it fresh and
valuable.” — George William Curtis.
** A golden volume, replete with sage thoughts and memorable sayings, —a
costly anthology, in which every specimen is either rich or strange.” — Pred-
erick H. Hedge.
**Tt will richly repay study to all who can find benefit in change of mental
aliment, and who are willing to be led bya scholarly hand through the gor-
geous and crowded Athenzum of Eastern literature.” — 7. Starr King.
‘** A masterpiece of Oriental scholarship.”
“Tt reveals to our reading world @ new vealm of incomparable fascina-
tion.”
4 Messrs. Roberts Brothers List.
POEMS.
By CHARLES SWAIN.
rvol. With a fine Portrait from a recent Photograph, engraved by
SmitH. Blue and gold. Price, $ 1.00.
4
This edition of Charles Swain’s Poems embraces, in addition 4
to the best poems in the different volumes published in England, 4
several pieces which are now printed for the first time. There 7
are upwards of three hundred songs, many of them so well known |
as to be almost ‘‘household words” throughout the land.
‘‘ Many of his songs have been wafted by their own aerial sweetness across
the sea; and his felicitous description of Scott’s funeral, (Dryburgh Abbey, )
attended by a procession of the romancer’s immortal characters, is too
graphic a tribute to genius not to be recalled with delight.” —H. 7. Tucker
man.
BULWER LYTTON’S
DRAMAS AND POEMS.
zrvol. With fine Portrait on steel, by ScHorr. Blue and gold.
Price, $ 1.00.
Containing the Dramas of THE LADY oF Lyons, RICHELIEU,
and Money, and Minor Poems.
‘* No living English writer is more read on the continent of Europe than Bul-
wer. His works have been translated into nearly all the living languages of
Europe.” — New American Cyclopedia.
THE SEER;
Or, COMMON-PLACES REFRESHED.
By LEIGH HUNT.
Beautifully printed from new type. 2vols. 16mo. Cloth, gilt. ,
Price, $ 2.50.
— ee ee ae
ase
It has been the aim of the Publishers, in producing this elegant
library edition of ‘‘The Seer,” to meet the wants of the many
American admirers of this genial essayist. :
cl. =
Messrs. Roberts Brothers List. 5
MEMOIRS OF MY LIFE AND WRITINGS,
By EDWARD GIBBON
(THE HISTORIAN).
rvol. xr6mo. Cloth, gilt. Price, $1.25. (J Press.)
Every reader of the Historian will be glad to possess themselves
of this neat edition of his Memoirs, which is not only a model for
simplicity of style, but is a complete picture of his talents, his dis-
position, his studies, and his attainments.
HEAVEN ouR Home.
WE HAVE NO SAVIOUR BUT JESUS, AND NO HOME
BUT HEAVEN.
Crown 8vo. Cloth, extra. Price, $1.25.
Opinions of the English Press.
‘‘'The author of the volume before us endeavors to describe what heaven is,
as shown by the light of reason and Scripture; and we promise the reader
many charming pictures of heavenly bliss, founded upon undeniable authority,
and described with the pen of a dramatist, which cannot fail to elevate the
soul as well as to delight the imagination. .... Part Second proves, in
a manner as beautiful as it is convincing, the doctrine of the recognition of
friends in heaven, —a subject of which the author makes much, introducing
many touching scenes of Scripture celebrities meeting in heaven and discours-
ing of their experience on earth. Part Third demonstrates the interest which
those in heaven feel in earth, and proves with remarkable clearness that such
an interest exists not only with the Almighty and among the angels, but also
among the spirits of departed friends. We unhesitatingly give our opinion, that
this volume is one of the most delightful productions of a religious character
which has appeared for some time ; and we would desire to see it pass into ex-
tensive circulation.” — Glasgow Herald.
** This work gives positive and social views of heaven, as a counteraction to
the negative and unsocial aspects in which the subject is so commonly pre-
sented.” — English Churchman.
*
6 Messrs. Roberts Brothers List.
** Amid the works proceeding from an overteeming press, our attention has
been arrested by the perusal of the above-named production, which, it seems,
is wending its way daily among persons of all denominations. Certainly
‘Heaven our Home,’ whoever may be the author, is no common production.”
— Airdrie Advertiser.
“In boldness of.conception, startling minuteness of delineation, and origi-
nality of illustration, this work, by an anonymous author, exceeds any of the
kind we have ever read.” — ¥ohn O’Groat Fournal. -
‘*We are not in the least surprised at so many thousands of copies of this
anonymous writer’s being bought up. We seem to be listening to a voice and
language which we never heard before. Matter comes at command; words
flow with unstudied ease; the pages are full of life, light, and force; and the
result is a stirring volume, which, while the Christian critic pronounces it free
from affectation, even the man of taste, averse to evangelical religion, would
admit to be exempt from ‘ cant.’” — London Patriot.
“‘ The name of the author of this work is strangely enough withheld. ... .
A social heaven, in which there will be the most perfect recognition, inter-
course, fellowship, and bliss, is the leading idea of the book, and it is discussed
in a fine genial spirit.” — Caledonian Mercury.
MEET FOR HEAVEN.
A STATE OF GRACE UPON EARTH THE ONLY PREPARATION
FOR A STATE OF GLORY IN HEAVEN,
By the Author of ‘‘ Heaven our Home.”
| Crown 8vo. Cloth, extra. Price, $1.25.
Opinions of the English Press.
‘¢ This forms a fitting companion to ‘ Heaven our Home,’ —a volume which
has been ‘circulated by thousands, and which has found: its way into almost
every Christian family.” — Scottish Press.
‘¢ What we shall be hereafter, — whether our glorified souls will be like unto
our souls here, or whether an entire change in their spiritual and moral con-
dition will be effected after death,—these are questions which occupy our
thoughts, and to these the author has principally addressed himself.”” — Cazz-
bridge University Chronicle.
a en ie
Messrs. Roberts Brothers List. i
“The author, in his or her former work, ‘Heaven our Home,’ portrayed a
Social Heaven, where scattered families meet at last in loving intercourse and
in possession of perfect recognition, to spend a never-ending eternity of peace
and love. In the present work the individual state of the children of God is
attempted to be unfolded, and, more especially, the state of probation which is
set apart for them on earth to fit and prepare erring mortals for the society of
the saints... .
“The work, as a whole, displays an originality of conception, a flow of
language, and a closeness of reasoning, rarely found in religious publica-
fLONSs ss.
“The author combats the pleasing and generally-accepted belief that death
will effect an entire change of the spiritual condition of our souls, and that all
who enter into bliss will be placed on a common level.” — Glasgow Herald.
*°A careful pérusal of this book will make it a less easy thing for a man to
cheat himself into the notion that death will effect, not a mere transition and
improvement, but an entire change in his moral and spiritual state. The
dangerous nature of this delusion is exhibited with great power by the author
of ‘ Meet for Heaven.’ ” — Stirling Observer.
“This, like the former volume, ‘Heaven our Home,’ by the same anony-
mous author, is a very remarkable book. Often as the subject has been
handled, both by ancient and modern divines, it has never been touched with
a bolder or a more masterly hand.” — ¥ohu O’Groat Fournal,
In Press.
LIFE IN HEAVEN.
THERE, FAITH IS CHANGED INTO SIGHT, AND HOPE IS ~
PASSED INTO BLISSFUL FRUITION.
A New Work by the Author of ‘‘ Heaven our Home,” and
‘* Meet for Heaven.”
Crown 8vo. Cloth, extra. Price, $1.25.
This new work is a companion volume to ‘‘ Heaven our Home,”
and ‘‘ Meet for Heaven,” and embraces a subject of very great
interest, which has not been included in these volumes.
The two works above mentioned have already attained in Eng-
land the large sale of 100,000 copies.
Ss" Messrs. Roberts Brothers List.
Lev. sf Hl. Ingrahan’s Popular Works.
THE
PRINCE OF THE House oF DAviD;
Or, THREE YEARS IN THE HOLY CITY.
Being a Series of Letters of Adina, a Jewess of Alexandria, sup-
posed to be sojourning in Jerusalem in the days of Herod,
addressed to her father, a wealthy Jew in Egypt, and relating,
as if by an eyewitness, all the scenes and wonderful incidents
in the Life of Jesus of Nazareth, from his Baptism in Jordan to
his Crucifixion on Calvary. By Rev. J. H. INGRAHAM.
rvol. r2mo. Cloth, gilt. Price, $2.00.
THE
PILLAR OF @2iRee
Or, ISRAEL IN BONDAGE.
Being an Account of the Wonderful Scenes in the Life of the
Son of Pharaoh’s Daughter (Moses), together with Picturesque
Sketches of the Hebrews under their Taskmasters. By REv.
J. H. INGRAHAM.
tvol. zzmo. Cloth, gilt. Price, $ 2.00.
THE
THRONE OF DAVID,
FROM THE CONSECRATION OF THE SHEPHERD OF BETH-
LEHEM TO THE REBELLION OF PRINCE ABSALOM.
Being an Illustration of the Splendor, Power, and Dominion of
the Reign of the Shepherd, Poet, Warrior, King and Prophet,
Ancestor and Type of Jesus; in a Series of Letters addressed
by an Assyrian Ambassador to his Lord and King on the
Throne of Nineveh. By Rev. J. H. INGRAHAM.
tvol. r2mo. Cloth, gilt. Price, $ 2.00.
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tao. GN Phe:
Lhe Tiger Prince ;
Or, Adventures in the Wilds of Abyssinia. By Wittram DaLtTon.
Beautifully illustrated. xvol. 16mo. Fancy cloth, gilt. Price, $1.25.
Gascoyne, the Sandal-Wood Trader.
A tale of the Pacific. By R. M. BaLttantyne, Beautifully illustrated,
tvol. x16mo. Fancy cloth, gilt. Price, $1.25.
The Pigeon Pie.
A Taie of Roundhead Times. By Miss Yoncgs, author of ‘‘The Heir
of Redclyffe.” With many beautiful illustrations. 21 vol. 316mo, Fancy
cloth, gilt. Price, $ 1.25.
Lhe Tanner Boy,
And how he became Lieutenant-General. By Major PENNIMAN.
Beautifully illustrated. x vol. 16mo. Fancy cloth, gilt. Price, $1.25.
This is a boy's life of Major-General Grant, and depicts with historical
accuracy the leading events in his career, from earliest boyhood to the
present time.
Helen and her Cousins ;
Or, Two Months at Ashfield Rectory. Beautifully illustrated. x vol.
16mo. Fancy cloth, gilt. Price, 50 cents.
The Fitstory of Sandford and Merton.
By Tuomas Day, Esq. A new edition; revised throughout, and em-
bellished with very numerous engravings. 1vol. Square 16mo. Fancy
cloth, gilt. Price, $1.25.
Popular Fairy Tales.
Containing the choicest and best known Fairy Stories. Illustrated by
engravings from designs bythe most celebrated French artists. First and
second series. Square 16mo. Fancy cloth, gilt. Price of each series,
(sold separately,) $ 1.00.
Paul Prestows Voyages, Travels, and Remarkable
Adventures,
As related by himself. With numerous illustrations. Square 16mo,
Fancy cloth, gilt. Price § 1.00.
Lhe Fairy Library.
Containing — Fopitar F aay Tales — First series ;
«« — Second Series;
Paul Preston’s Adventures.
Illustrated. Three volumes in a neat box. Fancy cloth, gilt. Price
$ 3.00.
10 Messrs. Roberts Brothers List.
Fables and Nursery Readings.
Containing Eighteen approved Nursery Fables, interspersed with read-
ings for the nursery. Fully illustrated. Square 16mo. Fancy cloth, gilt.
Price 63 cents.
Simple Lessons for Little Learners,
On a popular plan. Part First, words of one and two syllables. Part
Second, words of more than two syllables. To which is added, CopwEess
TO CATCH F.uiEs; or, Dialogues in short sentences, adapted to children
from’ the age of three to eight years. With characteristic illustrations.
rvol. Square 16mo. Fancy cloth, gilt. Price 63 cents.
Farewell Tales.
‘By Mrs. Horrianp, author of the ‘‘Merchant’s Widow,” &c. With
engravings. xvol. Square16mo. Fancy cloth, gilt. Price 63 cents.
The Little Learner's Library, ;
Containing — Simple Lessons for Little Learners; ¢
Fables and Nursery Readings ;
Mrs. Hoffland’s Farewell Tales.
Illustrated. Three volumes, ina neat box. Fancy cloth, gilt. Price
§ 1.88.
Fireside Tales,
In Prose and Verse. By Mary Howitt. With illustrations. x vol
16mo. Fancy cloth, gilt. Price 75 cents.
Lhe Scottish Orphans ;
A Moral Tale, founded on an historical fact ; to which is added, ARTHUR
MoNTEITH, a continuation of the Scottish Orphans. By Mrs. BLackForp.
rvol. z6mo. Fancy cloth, gilt. Price 75 cents.
The Fireside Library,
Containing — Fireside Tales. By Mary Howitt;
The Turtle Dove ; and other Stories. By MAry Howitr;
The Christmas Tree, and other Stories. By Mary
Howitt ;
The Scottish Orphans; a Moral Tale. By Mrs. Biack-
FORD ;
Arthur Monteith; a sequel to the Scottish Orphans. By
Mrs BLACKFORD.
Helen and her Cousins; or, Two Months at Ashfield
Rectory.
Illustrated. Six volumes, with a neat box. iz6mo. Fancy cloth, gilt.
Price $ 3.00.
THE GETTY CENTER
LIBRARY
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