You are here
قراءة كتاب Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 64, No. 398, December 1848
تنويه: تعرض هنا نبذة من اول ١٠ صفحات فقط من الكتاب الالكتروني، لقراءة الكتاب كاملا اضغط على الزر “اشتر الآن"
Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 64, No. 398, December 1848
class="i0">Few are the hearts whence one same touch
Bids the sweet fountains flow:
Few—and by still conflicting powers,
Forbidden here to meet;
Such ties would make this life of ours
Too fair for aught so fleet.
Sees not as thine, which turns
In such deep reverence to the sky
Where the rich sunset burns:
It may be that the breath of spring,
Born amidst violets lone,
A rapture o'er thy soul can bring—
A dream, to his unknown.
A sorrowful delight!
The melody of distant chimes,
The sound of waves by night;
The wind that, with so many a tone,
Some chord within can thrill—
These may have language all thine own,
To him a mystery still.
And steadfast love of years;
The kindly, that from childhood grew,
The faithful to thy tears!
If there be one that o'er the dead
Hath in thy grief borne part,
And watched through sickness by thy bed—
Call his a kindred heart!
Wherein bright spirits blend;
Like sister-flowers of one sweet shade,
With the same breeze that bend;
For that full bliss of thought allied,
Never to mortals given—
Oh! lay thy lonely dreams aside,
Or lift them unto heaven.
We follow no further the events of her biography. We have here all that reflects a light upon the poems themselves. That Welsh life among the mountains—the little girl with her Shakspeare in the apple-tree—that beauty of fifteen, full of poetry and enthusiasm and love—marriage—disappointment—and the living afterwards, with her children round her, in a condition worse than widowhood;—here is all the comment that her biography affords on her sweet and melancholy verse.
And how vividly the verse reflects the life! How redolent of nature is her poetry! how true her pictures of mountain, and forest, and river, and sky! It requires that the reader should have been himself a long and accurate observer of rural scenes, to follow her imagination, and feel the truth of her rapid and unpretending descriptions. It is singular how, without the least apparent effort, all the persons she brings before us are immediately localised on the green earth—trees wave around them, flowers spring at their feet, as if this were quite natural and unavoidable. How sweet a part does the quiet charm of nature take in the piece called
THE VOICE OF HOME TO THE PRODIGAL.
To thy spirit's early loves?
To the freshness of the morn,
To the stillness of the groves?
The household porch around,
And the merry waters falling
With sweet laughter in their sound.
From their banks of moss and fern,
Breathe of the sunny hours—
But when wilt thou return?
From thy home without a guide;
And thy native woodland song
In thine altered heart hath died.
And the glory of thy spring;
And to thee the leaves' light play
Is a long-forgotten thing.
There is something very touching in the simplicity of these pleasures, contrasted with what imagination immediately suggests of the career and the tastes of the prodigal.
One great spectacle in nature alone, seems strangely to have lost its fascination upon our poetess—she never kindled to the sea. She seemed to view it as the image only of desolation and of ruin; to have associated it only with tempests and wreck, and have seen in it only the harmless waste of troubled waters. More than once she adopts a scriptural phrase—"And there shall be no more sea," as an expression of singular joy and congratulation. We question whether a single reader of her poems has ever felt the force of the expression as she did. The sea, next to the sky, is the grandest and most beautiful thing given to the eyes of man. But, by some perverse association, she never saw it in its natural beauty and sublimity, but looked at it always as the emblem of ruthless and destroying power. In The Last Song of Sappho, it is singular how much more the dread sea, into which Sappho is about to fling herself, possesses her imagination than the moral tempest within of that hapless poetess:—
Sound in thy scorn and pride!
I ask not, alien world, from thee
What my own kindred earth has still denied.
. . . . .
The laurel-wreath is mine—
With a lone heart, a weary frame,
O restless deep! I come to make them thine!
Place in thy darkest hold!
Bury my anguish, my renown,
With hidden wrecks, lost gems, and wasted gold.
And with what an indignant voice, and with what a series of harshest epithets, does she call upon the sea to deliver up its human prey, in the fine spirited poem, called—
THE TREASURES OF THE DEEP.
Thou hollow-sounding and mysterious main?
Pale glistening pearls and rainbow-coloured shells,
Bright things which gleam unrecked of and in vain!
Keep, keep thy riches, melancholy sea!
We ask not such from thee.
Far down, and shining through