E450200B. Poems (1844).
The Dublin University Magazine, February 1845, pp. 144–154.
As reprinted in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 10, 364–371.
When, some time ago, we quoted Miss Barrett’s “Cry of the Children” from Blackwood,* we were unconscious that we were citing the work of a practised poet. On the contrary, it seemed to us that the crude energy of some of the lines betokened a new hand, little careful either of the mode or vehicle of expression, provided only the strong feeling could be conveyed; and truly the feeling was strong, heart-stirring, pious, and lovely; and the verses swept on with a broad and deep flow of melody, as well as of power. But two volumes of elaborate poetry, since published, have admonished us of our error, and taught us that the excess of cultivation can run into a wildness as uncouth as its defect; as we sometimes see the artificial wilderness of the garden even more tangled and briary than the natural thicket. These far-fetched thoughts and phrases, which we supposed had been thrust into the “Cry,” to fill here and there its occasional gaps of rhyme and reason—such as the idea of God plucking the silence “sweet to gather,” suggesting such an incongruous notion of a nosegay—of the old man weeping for his to-morrow, “which is lost in long ago,” a transposition of times as idle in any application to the subject as it is paradoxical in itself—of the world’s loving teaching “God’s possible,” which is any thing to the purpose or not, as you please to read it;—these puerilities of the composition, we say, which we considered the occasional stammerings of a tongue laden with an unaccustomed burthen of great utterances, turn out to be the very niceties and intended elegancies of Miss Barrett’s style, who trifles with such conceits in the midst of her best performances, with apparently as grave a consciousness of her science as a singer who goes off with his shakes and falsettoes in the most solemn passages of an Oratorio. But, for all this, we have seen no recent poem to match with “The Cry of the Children.” It stands alone for tenderness, fervour, and force, among all the outpourings of the spirit of humanity of our time. It is essentially the protest of a woman on behalf of that infancy of which woman is the proper protectress and advocate. The pillow which God gives to the head of the infant on its mother’s breast is not warmer, tenderer, or more peculiarly its own, than the sympathy for these poor children, expressed with such a fervour of sentiment and vividness of imagination in these heart-stirring stanzas. You feel your heart ache and your head grow dizzy with the poor young creatures; and as your indignation kindles against their oppressors, you love the noble womanly soul that has made you feel so well what is just and humane. May these stanzas have the audience they deserve. May the people of England lay them to heart, and begin to think what it is they have been doing with God’s images, with those who will yet be the fathers and mothers of a future generation—transmitters of feebleness, decreptitude, timidity, querulousness, and carelessness of God, to the future representatives of their strong, cheerful, and pious race.
“For oh,” say the children, “we are weary,
And we cannot run or leap—
If we cared for any meadows, it were merely
To drop down in them and sleep.
Our knees tremble sorely in the stooping—
We fall upon our faces, trying to go;
And, underneath our heavy eyelids drooping,
The reddest flower would look as pale as snow.
For, all day, we drag our burden tiring,
Through the coal-dark, underground—
Or, all day, we drive the wheels of iron
In the factories, round and round.
“For, all day, the wheels are droning, turning—
Their wind comes in our faces— [p. 145→]
Till our hearts turn—our heads, with pulses burning,
And the walls turn in their places—
Turns the sky in the high window blank and reeling—
Turns the long light that droppeth down the wall—
Turn the black flies that crawl along the ceiling—
All are turning, all the day, and we with all!—
And all day, the iron wheels are droning;
And sometimes we could pray,
‘O ye wheels,’ (breaking out in a mad moaning,)
‘Stop! be silent for to-day!’”
Ay! be silent! Let them hear each other breathing
For a moment, mouth to mouth—
Let them touch each other’s hands, in a fresh wreathing
Of their tender human youth!
Let them feel that this cold metallic motion
Is not all the life God fashions or reveals—
Let them prove their inward souls against the notion
That they live in you, or under you,
O wheels!—
Still, all day, the iron wheels go onward,
As if Fate in each were stark;
And the children’s souls, which God is calling sunward,
Spin on blindly in the dark.
________
*See letter 1753, note 3.
________
That such a piece should be deformed by singularities, not to say conceits, is quite distressing. It ought to speak to every mind as plainly as to every heart. The sordid mill-tyrant ought to have no opportunity of saying, “Who heeds the pictures of so whimsical an imagination?” In a word, however strained forms of speech, recondite analogies, or even elegant mannerisms, may entertain minds which have exhausted the ordinary sources of intellectual enjoyment in the belles-lettres, they are not fit for the true poetry of the world of men and women, which, in all its highest achievements, has ever been simple, unaffected, and direct. Poetry may be as learned as erudition can make it, without the least touch of foppery. See with what a simple dignity Virgil wears his toga! With what a plain yet majestic gravity John Milton delivers the accumulated learning of the Jewish, the Gentile, and the Christian worlds! Did Shakspeare run about for conceits, or grasp after outrè words?—or who has had to stop in the middle of a stanza of Byron to puzzle out the meaning or the application of a phrase? Shelley himself, the parent of all these vices in modern English poetry, is scarce ever merely verbally transcendental, as Tennyson and the other exaggerators of his school so often now-a-days are. Yet even Shelley’s abstruse and fine-drawn analogies hurt his poetry, and withdraw it from the sympathy of mankind. It is well, indeed, that some of Shelley’s poems should be thus unfitted for the world; for we know not what would become of society with such a guide; but where faith and opinion coincide with the established laws of society, as with Miss Barrett they do, then every thing that narrows the sphere of influence claimed by her humane and religious muse is a positive foe to the public good which she otherwise might promote, by making mankind more contented with their condition, and better acquainted with the law of God. For it is quite vain to think that the common sense of mankind will take up with the little sophisticated mannerisms of the school to which Miss Barrett, in an evil hour, has addicted herself. A false taste in London may give these peculiarities a temporary eclat, just as the verbal pleasantries of Punch pass there at present for wit. But those who desire to hear the voice of independent criticism, will not always listen at the doors of publishers, whose own organs affect to stamp the character of their own brochures; nor will all the attractions of the daily issue of verse and prose with which the sickly taste of a luxurious metropolis is pampered, induce us here, who have nothing but the healthy use of our own minds to depend on for our own comfort and the advancement of our country, to abandon the ancient and standard models in these matters. We bless our stars, indeed, that we are not called on to read the current literature of England of the day—that our lot has been cast beyond the reach of more than one in a hundred of their plays, lays, autobiographies, memoirs, diaries, and the rest of the fustian stuff with which they keep up their supply of matter for the reviews. [p. 146→] What a life, indeed, must these unfortunate gentlemen lead, whose occupation it is to notice the daily, weekly, and monthly issues of the metropolitan press! No wonder that a depraved taste has grown up under their supervision; for continual conversation with mediocrity must necessarily react on the mind,
“——Like the dyer’s hand,
Subdued to what it works in.”
And these literary undertakers have hardly ever an hour’s experience of excellence in any department; since the business of their lives is to notice the works of the day, and the day produces little else than trumpery. We own we are heartily glad to be out of that literary world, and submit ourselves to the provincial barbarity of our Shakspeares and Homers with perfect resignation. But we cannot help feeling a degree of indignation and regret at seeing how much true genius is misled and misused when it occasionally happens to receive its forming impulses in that nursery. Here, in Miss Barrett’s case, we see a highly poetical and accomplished mind positively hindered from the expression of a thousand delightful things by the obstruction of a false taste, which, but for the metropolitan newspaper critics, and smaller fry of reviewers, would never have had an existence. There is no string on the lyre which Miss Barrett might not sound, if her hand had been left free from their trammels;—as it is, she harps successfully on one string only; and the world has lost, so far, the melody of a mind which, expressing itself through the ordinary forms of the English tongue, and addressing itself to the apprehensions of unsophisticated readers, might have embraced all the highest, boldest, and tenderest tones of humanity.
The principal poem of the collection is a mystic drama of the exile of our first parents from paradise. In this piece, while anxiously shunning an intrusion on the path of Milton, Miss Barrett has unconsciously trodden very closely in the footsteps of Shelley, whose Promethean choruses haunt her ear with a perpetually-recurring echo. But Miss Barrett aims at loftier and even more inexpressible mysteries than Shelley, and in proportion as her desire is greater and her strength less—she will feel that it is no disparagement to be reckoned less strong than Shelley—so her efforts at expression are more strained, and her demands on phraseology more extortionate. All the machinery of her drama is marked by the same effort to make inadequate images adequate to an immeasurable mystery, by dwelling on the details with an inordinate particularity, which only defeats its own object by making them fantastic. The characters, too—Eve excepted—are of a class beyond Miss Barrett’s proper powers of conception; and the portraits are imperfect accordingly. Satan reminds us of a petulant bad boy; Gabriel is a sad nincompoop; Adam a metaphysician; and Another—whose name we cannot profane by introduction here, and whose presence, we think, would have been better left out of such a composition—talks like a Professor rather than a Deity. Then, instead of the good old “alarms, excursions,” of Shakspeare, leaving the suggestion of the particular images of the scene to Richard himself, Miss Barrett lays a preliminary tax on our imagination by requiring us to figure in our minds a wonderful variety of devices of scenery and machinery as introductory to the proper action of her drama. Thus, the murmurings of future life, which come humming round the ears of Eve, after she has endured the reproaches of organic and inorganic nature, are ushered in with one of these incomprehensible stage directions which, to our mind, greatly diminishes the effect of the succeeding stanzas. A rose from paradise is lying on the path: here are the directions to the scene-shifter:—“A bleak wind, quickened with indistinct human voices, spins round the earth-zodiac; and filling the circle with its presence, and then wailing off towards the East, carries the flower away with it. * * The wind revolves from the East, and then round again to the East, perfumed with the Eden flower, and full of voices, which sweep out into articulation as they pass.” Fiddle-faddle! But let us hear the voices.
Infant voices passing in the wind.
O we live, O we live—
And this life that we receive,
Is a warm thing and a new,
Which we softly bud into, [p. 147→]
From the heart and from the brain,—
Something strange, that overmuch is
Of the sound and of the sight,
Flowing round in trickling touches,
In a sorrow and delight,—
Yet is it all in vain?
Rock us softly,
Lest it be all in vain.
Youthful voices passing.
O we live, O we live—
And this life that we achieve,
Is a loud thing and a bold,
Which, with pulses manifold,
Strikes the heart out full and fain—
Active doer, noble liver,
Strong to struggle, sure to conquer,
—Tho’ the vessel’s prow will quiver
At the lifting of the anchor:
Yet do we strive in vain?
Infant voices passing.
Rock us softly,
Lest it be all in vain.
Poet voices passing.
O we live, O we live—
And this life that we conceive,
Is a clear thing and a fair,
Which we set in crystal air,
That its beauty may be plain;
With a breathing and a flooding
Of the heaven-life on the whole,
While we hear the forests budding
To the music of the soul—
Yet is it tuned in vain?
Infant voices passing.
Rock us softly,
Lest it be all in vain.
Philosophic voices passing.
O we live, O we live—
And this life that we perceive,
Is a strong thing and a grave,
Which for others’ use we have,
Duty-laden to remain.
We are helpers, fellow-creatures,
Of the right against the wrong—
We are earnest-hearted teachers
Of the truth which maketh strong—
Yet do we teach in vain?
Infant voices passing.
Rock us softly,
Lest it be all in vain.
Revel voices passing.
O we live, O we live—
And this life that we reprieve,
Is a low thing and a light,
Which is jested out of sight,
And made worthy of disdain!
Strike with bold electric laughter
The high tops of things divine—
Turn thy head, my brother, after,
Lest thy tears fall in my wine;—
For is all laughed in vain?
. . . . . . .
Poet voices passing.
O we live, O we live—
And this life that we believe,
Is a noble thing and high,
Which we climb up loftily,
To view God without a stain.
Till, recoiling where the shade is,
We retread our steps again,
And descend the gloomy Hades,
To taste man’s mortal pain.
Shall it be climbed in vain?
Infant voices passing.
Rock us softly,
Lest it be all in vain.
Love voices passing.
O we live, O we live—
And this life we would retrieve,
Is a faithful thing apart,
Which we love in, heart to heart,
Until one heart fitteth twain.
“Wilt thou be one with me?”
“I will be one with thee!”
“Ha, ha!—we love and live!”
Alas! ye love and die!
Shriek—who shall reply?
For is it not loved in vain?
Infant voices passing.
Rock us softly,
Though it be all in vain.
Old voices passing.
O we live, O we live—
And this life that we receive,
Is a gloomy thing and brief,
Which, consummated in grief,
Leaveth ashes for all gain.
Is it not all in vain?
Infant voices passing.
Rock us softly,
Though it be all in vain.
Voices die away.
There is something very fine and appropriate in this idea of the embryo life of the world making itself audible to the common mother of mankind, and preparing her mind, by its warming and softening influences, as Miss Barrett has arranged that it should do, for the consoling promises of Christ, with which the drama terminates. Of course we do not look for perfect purity, nor even for continuous sensibleness of diction, in a piece so essentially belonging to this affected school, itself introduced so fantastically, and forming part of a composition so transcendental: but, barring those peculiarities of phraseology which we cannot pretend even to understand much less affect to admire, we must be sensible of a world of feeling and thought in the expression of so many [p. 148→] of the great emotions of life in its successive phases, from the warmth and softness of the first consciousness of existence in the infant, to the harsh, cold regrets of decaying old age. This, however, is a subject on which Miss Barrett has evidently thought much and deeply; and although the rhapsody we are about to quote from on the same subject, is by no means a favourable specimen of her versification, for it is excessively grotesque, and at first sight we would have said of it, as of the “Cry of the Children,” that it is most carelessly put together—yet, to the contemplative mind it presents a picture of what we, who read it, are, and have been, and will be, more pregnant with matter for thought and suggestions of sentiment, and more alive itself with emotion, with action, and with passion, than a thousand out of the thousand and one poems of the same class, that writers even of good mark have given to mankind.
We are borne into life—it is sweet, it is strange!
We lie still on the knee of a mild Mystery,
Which smiles with a change!
But we doubt not of changes, we know not of spaces;
The Heavens seem as near as our own mother’s face is,
And we think we could touch all the stars that we see;
And the milk of our mother is white on our mouth!
And, with small childish hands, we are turning around
The apple of Life which another has found:—
It is warm with our touch, not with sun of the south,
And we count, as we turn it, the red side for four—
O Life, O Beyond,
Thou art sweet, thou art strange evermore.
Then all things look strange in the pure golden æther:
We walk through the gardens with hands linked together,
And the lilies look large as the trees;
And as loud as the birds, sing the bloom-loving bees—
And the birds sing like angels, so mystical fine;
And the cedars are brushing the archangel’s feet;
And time is eternity—love is divine,
And the world is complete!
Now, God bless the child—father, mother, respond.
O Life, O Beyond,
Thou art strange, thou art sweet.
Then we leap on the earth with the armour of youth,
And the earth rings again!
And we breathe out, “O beauty,”—we cry out, “O truth,”
And the bloom of our lips drops with wine;
And our blood runs amazed ’neath the calm hyaline—
The earth cleaves to the foot, the sun burns to the brain—
What is this exultation, and what this despair—
The strong pleasure is smiting the nerves into pain,
And we drop from the Fair, as we climb to the Fair,
And we lie in a trance at its feet;
And the breath of an angel cold-piercing the air
Breathes fresh on our faces in swoon;
And we think him so near, he is this side the sun!
And we wake to a whisper self-murmured and fond,
O Life, O Beyond,
Thou art strange, thou art sweet!
And the winds and the waters in pastoral measures,
Go winding around us, with roll upon roll,
Till the soul lies within in a circle of pleasures,
Which hideth the soul!
And we run with the stag, and we leap with the horse,
And we swim with the fish through the broad water-course,
And we strike with the falcon, and hunt with the hound,
And the joy which is in us, flies out with a wound;
And we shout so aloud, “We exult, we rejoice,”
That we lose the low moan of our brothers around—
And we shout so adeep down creation’s profound,
We are deaf to God’s voice—
And we bind the rose-garland on forehead and ears,
Yet we are not ashamed;
And the dew of the roses that runneth unblamed
Down our cheeks, is not taken for tears.
. . . . . . .
Then we act to a purpose—we spring up erect—
We will tame the wild mouths of the wilderness-steeds; [p. 149→]
We will plough up the deep in the ships double-decked;
We will build the great cities, and do the great deeds—
Strike the steel upon steel, strike the soul upon soul,
Strike the dole on the weal, overcoming the dole—
Let the cloud meet the cloud in a grand thunder-roll!
While the eagle of Thought rides the tempest in scorn,
Who cares if the lightning is burning the corn?
. . . . . . .
Speed me, God!—serve me, man!—I am god over men!
When I speak in my cloud, none shall answer again—
’Neath the stripe and the bond,
Lie and mourn at my feet!—
O thou Life, O Beyond,
Thou art strange, thou art sweet!
Then we grow into thought—and with inward ascensions,
Touch the bounds of our Being!
We lie in the dark here, swathed doubly around
With our sensual relations and social conventions—
Yet are ’ware of a sight, yet are ’ware of a sound
Beyond Hearing and Seeing—
Are aware that a Hades rolls deep on all sides,
With its infinite tides,
About and above us—until the strong arch
Of our life creaks and bends as if ready for falling,
And through all the dim rolling, we hear the sweet calling
Of spirits that speak in a soft under-tongue,
The interpretive sense of the mystical march:
And we cry to them softly, “Come nearer, come nearer—
And lift up the lap of this Dark, and speak clearer,
And teach us the song that ye sung.”
And we smile in our thought, if they answer or no—
For to dream of a sweetness is sweet as to know!—
Wonders breathe in our face,
And we ask not their name;
And Love takes all the blame
Of the world’s prison-place.
And we sing back the songs as we guess them, aloud;
And we send up the lark of our music that cuts
Untired through the cloud,
To beat with its wings at the lattice Heaven shuts:
Yet the angels look down, and the mortals look up,
As the little wings beat,
And the poet is blessed with their pity or hope.
’Twixt the Heavens and the earth, can a poet despond?
O Life, O Beyond,
Thou art strange, thou art sweet!
Perhaps you may have to read it twice—a great reproach to the writer as an artist—perhaps after reading it twice or oftener, there still may be portions of it which you cannot understand—a strong reproach to the writer both as a poet and a versifier; but with all this you gather from it a multitude of conceptions, vivid, lively, fruitful of new combinations, all rising to a lofty philosophic and pious notion of the relations of man to God, which it is good for us to receive into our minds, and which we could hardly receive there through any more pleasing combinations of intellectual and moral perceptions.
Miss Barrett is, at least to some extent, conscious of her peculiarities of phraseology; and not only admits, but takes a pride in declaring her anxiety to grasp at forms of expression adequate to carry out all her thoughts to the utmost extent. “I strive and struggle,” she says, and says it with wonderful vigour and ability—
With stammering lips and insufficient sound,
I strive and struggle to deliver right
That music of my nature, day and night
With dream and thought and feeling, interwound;
And inly answering all the senses round
With octaves of a mystic depth and height,
Which step out grandly to the infinite
From the dark edges of the sensual ground!
This song of soul I struggle to outbear
Through portals of the sense, sublime and whole,
And utter all myself into the air.
But if I did it,—as the thunder-roll
Breaks its own cloud,—my flesh would perish there,
Before that dread apocalypse of soul.
Now in all poetry there must be far more hinted at, suggested, credited to the sympathies of the reader, than expressed; and whenever the expression requires the employment of a vehicle such as cannot enter in at the gates of the mind without an effort, then it is [p. 150→] surely better to trust to these auxiliaries whose assistance we must depend on to so great an extent, at all events, for the spontaneous communication of the extra image, analogy, or sentiment, than, by calling down all the faculties to make way for it, crowd and obstruct the very avenues of thought. Miss Barrett herself has presented us with the image which we had nearly degraded to a wagon of hay in a gateway. “A poet,” she says, and truly, “ought not to read his own verses,”
For the echo in you, breaks upon the words which you are speaking,
And the chariot-wheels jar in the gate thro’ which you drive them forth.
Still more ought the poet to guard against such jars against the gate-posts, in driving the chariot of thought in; and indeed there are abundant means of expression without resorting to these new-fangled phrases. Thebes surely had enough of properly-appointed chariots without choking its gates with the wagons of Scythia. But Miss Barrett will not admit the justness of the comparison; for these uncouth vehicles, to which she occasionally commits her more daring imaginations, belong to that new hundred-gated city of conceits, founded by the Shelleyists, and lately adorned with gilded battlements and certain splendid dog-vanes by Tennyson, out of which the disciples of that school will not allow that any thing issues that is not golden, graceful, and magnificent.
That this new Jerusalem of theirs sends forth, however, many emanations too dazzling for the purblind eyes of the present age to make head or tail of, they all readily admit. But this, say they, is because the dullness of the age lags behind our mounting spirits, and we expatiate in a region to which the mind of man in the mass has not yet ascended; and so when they find their intellectual conceptions unlike those of the rest of the world, they dote on them with the same fondness that parents show towards ricketty, precocious children, singing complacently—
My song I fear that thou wilt find but few
Who fitly shall conceive thy reasoning,
Of such hard matter dost thou entertain;
Whence if, by misadventure, chance should bring
Thee to base company, as chance may do,
Quite unaware of what thou dost contain;—
I pr’y thee comfort thy sweet self again,
My last delight! tell them that they are dull,
And bid them own that thou art beautiful.
If poets could be sure that they sing in advance of the intellect of the age, the consolation of knowing that the time of appreciation was approaching, might reconcile them in some measure to their barren vocation, though the consciousness of having withdrawn faculties, given by God for the use and pleasure of the world we live in, to the service of a world the very existence of which still rests in speculation, must always dash the solitary enjoyment with more or less self-reproach; but how poignant must the sense of these misfeasances be in the mind of any one who has begun to suspect that instead of being in advance of the intellect of the age, he has only been beside it. Miss Barrett has imaged the condition of the former class very truly and touchingly in the case of the rose blown prematurely in the spring, and whose leaves had all fallen before the advent of the nightingale. The verses, apart from that odious practice of the London school, of making the words of least significance, the “thes” and “ands” of the verse, bear the main burthen of the rhythmical emphasis—are sweet and significant; and we have no doubt that they were written in the full and sincere belief of all that they so feelingly express.
A rose once grew within
A garden April-green,
In her loneness, in her loneness,
And the fairer for that oneness.
A white rose delicate,
On a tall bough and straight!
Early comer, early comer,
Never waiting for the summer.
Her pretty gestes did win
South winds to let her in,
In her loneness, in her loneness,
All the fairer for that oneness.
“For if I wait,” said she,
“Till times for roses be—
For the musk-rose and the moss-rose
Royal-red and maiden-blush rose—
“What glory then for me
In such a company?—
Roses plenty, roses plenty,
And one nightingale for twenty? [p. 151→]
“Nay, let me in,” said she,
“Before the rest are free—
In my loneness, in my loneness,
And the fairer for that oneness.
“For I would lonely stand,
Uplifting my white hand—
On a mission, on a mission,
To declare the coming vision.
“Upon which lifted sign,
What worship will be mine?
What addressing, what caressing!
And what thank, and praise, and blessing!”
. . . . . . .
So praying, did she win
South winds to let her in,
In her loneness, in her loneness,
And the fairer for that oneness.
But ah!—alas for her!
No thing did minister
To her praises, to her praises,
More than might unto a daisy’s.
No tree nor bush was seen
To boast a perfect green;
Scarcely having, scarcely having,
One leaf broad enough for waving.
. . . . . . .
The nightingale did please
To loiter beyond seas.
Guess him in the happy islands,
Learning music from the silence!
Only the bee, forsooth,
Came in the place of both;
Doing honour, doing honour,
To the honey-dews upon her.
. . . . . . .
—Poor Rose to be misknown!
Would, she had ne’er been blown,
In her loneness, in her loneness,
All the sadder for that oneness!
Some word she tried to say—
Some no .... ah, wellaway!
But the passion did o’ercome her,
And the fair frail leaves dropped from her—
Dropped from her, fair and mute,
Close to a poet’s foot,
Who beheld them, smiling slowly,
As at something sad yet holy:
Said, “Verily and thus
It chanceth eke with us
Poets singing sweetest snatches,
While that deaf men keep the watches—
“Vaunting to come before
Our own age evermore,
In a loneness, in a loneness,
And the nobler for that oneness!”
A great advocate in the peroration of a speech on a political trial said to the jury, “If I have alarmed your consciences, my client is safe.” In like manner, if any thing we have said or may say, can alarm Miss Barrett’s confidence in the coming of that time which she expects, when man will abandon the broad, strong sentiments appealed to by the elder poets, for the fine curiosities of thought and feeling which she so devotedly struggles to express—if any thing we should say can induce in her mind a doubt or a question whether possibly she may not have been straying beside the mind of the age, while she believed she was expatiating in advance of it, then our client, Literature, is saved from the loss of much that is good, beautiful, and ennobling, and a fine intellect is brought back again to efficient labours of love. If, on the contrary, she prefer the fascination of what is mysterious and transcendental, and the praises of a school, to the positive, though homely pleasure of calling up life’s ordinary emotions in the breasts of honest, warm-hearted people, and to the approbation of plain students, who care for little else, then we must reconcile ourselves to the loss, and turn for amends to our own young poets, who have learned their art apart from the sophistications of the newspapers, and the illusions of the soirees. But while we say this, we must own we see nothing among them at all so capable of great things, if it would only condescend to a legitimate style, as is the fine and strong intellect disguised under these oddly-expressed thoughts and evanescent images of Miss Barrett.
Criticism rarely fulfils any other office than that either of yielding the tribute of praise, which a writer receives as his due, or of dispensing censures, which may sometimes have the effect of repressing dulness or ignorance at the outset; but we are hardly ever fortunate enough to win erring genius from its faults. Yet we would fain hope that what we have said in condemnation of these excesses and defects, deforming so the fine conceptions of a gifted writer, may, in this instance, be vouchsafed a more auspicious influence; for we write in the most absolute earnestness of conviction—away from any interest, personal, publicational, or of any other kind what- [p. 152→] ever, except that interest which devotion to our native literature has given us in hailing whatever is worthy of our own young writers’ emulation wherever it may appear. Besides this, we are persuaded we address a mind too candid to evade a full and fair inquiry into these points of difference, which so strongly distinguish the present London school from the elder poets; and we would confidently hope that if such an examination should result in satisfying the inquirer that these peculiarities address themselves to only a small section of those for whose benefit her genius has been confided to her, we will yet have the pleasure and profit of hearing from Miss Barrett in strains more suitable to her really great and admirable vocation.
We have now done with whatever we deemed censurable, and desire—continuing, however, our protest against the occasional odd images and the emphatic “thes” and “ands”—to express our sense of the extreme grace and beauty of some of Miss Barrett’s minor poems. Of these the longest, and perhaps, on the whole, the ablest, is the “Vision of Poets,” a piece composed in triplets, even difficultly elegant in the elaborateness of its versification, but full of beauty and thought. The true and pseudo poets are passed successively in review, and you feel, as you proceed, that you are in the company of one to whom all the masters of the Greek, Latin, and Italian schools are familiar in the originals; for Miss Barrett’s writings bear all the tokens of being the work of a scholar, and a ripe one. Perhaps if we had to point out the piece in the whole collection which gave us, on the first reading, the greatest amount of pleasure, we should select the graceful lines addressed to her tutor, H. S. Boyd, Esq., who appears to have read with her, not only the ordinary classics, but the Greek romancists, several of the Christian fathers, and many of the disquisitions of the early schoolmen. The sentiment is something like that of Moore’s beautiful “Take hence the bowl,” the lines being suggested by a present of some wine of Cyprus, sent from the east by Mr. Boyd to his former pupil.
Very copious are my praises,
Though I sip it like a fly!—
Ah—but sipping—times and places
Change before me suddenly—
As Ulysses’ old libation
Drew the ghosts from every part,
So your Cyprian wine, dear Græcian,
Stirs the Hades of my heart.
And I think of those long mornings
Which my thought goes far to seek,
When, betwixt the folio’s turnings,
Solemn flowed the rhythmic Greek.
Past the pane, the mountain spreading,
Swept the sheep-bells’ tinkling noise,
While a girlish voice was reading—
Somewhat low for αι’s and οι’s!
We have an impression on our mind that this is one of our county Antrim Boyds, and, coupling this with a phrase in the same piece, “Do you mind that deed of Atè?” we begin to suspect that Miss Barrett herself is, like that other admirable daughter of genius, whose maiden name we only recognized the other day, Mrs. Jameson, a countrywoman of our own; for, indeed, in what department of art, or of letters, is not the intellect of this part of the empire outstripping all competition? But to return to the poems before us. We shall say no more of the “Brown Rosary,” the “Romaunt of the Page,” and the “Lay of the Duchess May,” than that they are pieces of a kind in which the writer, though always graceful, is far from being at home; but of “the Lay of the Swan’s Nest,” “the Bower,” and especially of that sweet and pathetic ballad of “Bertha in the Lane,” we have nothing to express but admiration, joined with thanks to the delicate genius which has given us creations so exquisite. “Bertha in the Lane” is the beautiful and tender confession of a wounded spirit, gentle, sensitive, and self-sacrificing. Her own sister has won her lover from her, and as the wedding-day approaches, the wronged but affectionate and forgiving soul, pours itself forth in a confiding detail of its emotions, which none but a woman of exquisite sensibility could have conceived, and none but a very able poet could have so exquisitely expressed. It is a piece, however, which will be infinitely better understood by women, and by those who have loved deeply, than by men. Men, fortunately for themselves and for society, require the presence of the loved object and the bond of chil- [p. 153→] dren, to sustain an early passion undiminished through life. Women having loved once, will, too often, love on, feeding a destructive passion on their own bereaved hearts, though the object of their affection be lost to them for ever. We cannot commend the indulgence in this excessive sensitiveness, though some affect to take it for almost the divinest quality of the female breast; nor do we think it desirable that there should be many Berthas in society. But if ever a gentle, confiding, pious creature claimed our sympathy for a passion, which she could not conquer, we may take Miss Barrett’s Bertha, as the most exquisite exponent of the case of such a one—a being, indeed,made up altogether of love, of faith, and meekness.
We are so unlike each other,
Thou and I; that none could guess
We were children of one mother,
But for mutual tenderness.
Thou art rose-lined from the cold,
And meant, verily, to hold
Life’s pure pleasures manifold.
I am pale as crocus grows
Close beside a rose-tree’s root!
Whosoe’er would reach the rose,
Treads the crocus underfoot—
I, like May-bloom on thorn-tree—
Thou, like merry summer-bee!
Fit that I be plucked for thee.
. . . . . . .
Colder grow my hands and feet—
When I wear the shroud I made,
Let the folds lie straight and neat,
And the rosemary be spread,—
That if any friend should come,
(To see thee, sweet!) all the room
May be lifted out of gloom.
And, dear Bertha, let me keep
On my hand this little ring,
Which at nights, when others sleep,
I can still see glittering.
Let me wear it out of sight,
In the grave,—where it will light
All the Dark up, day and night.
On that grave, drop not a tear!
Else, though fathom-deep the place,
Through the woollen shroud I wear,
I shall feel it on my face.
Rather smile there, blessed one,
Thinking of me in the sun—
Or forget me—smiling on!
Art thou near me? nearer? so!
Kiss me close upon the eyes,—
That the earthly light may go
Sweetly as it used to rise,—
When I watched the morning-gray
Strike, betwixt the hills, the way
He was sure to come that day.
So,—no more vain words be said!
The hosannas nearer roll—
Mother, smile now on thy Dead,—
I am death-strong in my soul!
Mystic Dove alit on cross,
Guide the poor bird of the snows
Through the snow-wind above loss!
Jesus, Victim, comprehending
Love’s divine self-abnegation,—
Cleanse my love in its self-spending,
And absorb the poor libation!
Wind my thread of life up higher,
Up through angels’ hands of fire!—
I aspire, while I expire!
The “Lay of the Swan’s Nest,” and “the Bower” deal with a less painful subject, though one that has wrung many a sigh from the hearts of every generation of mankind—the regret merely which ingenuous hearts experience in the loss of the ideal illusions of youth. Both aim at exciting the sentiment by the simplest incidents. Little Ellie’s Swan’s Nest, which she was to show The Knight, when he should come by-and-by sly “riding on a steed of steeds” to court her—God bless the little innocent dreamer and her visions of pages and palfreys!—found deserted, and the reeds which had protected it from observation gnawed away by the river rats; and the Bower which little Elizabeth had found out, and seen once, and once only, in the coppice, lost to all her further search, and nothing like it ever to be found in any wood or grove again. These are the incidents which, simple as they are, Miss Barrett has invested with a great degree of interest for the imagination, as well as with much significant matter for the graver uses of reflection. The “Bower” especially rises to a fine religious significance at the close; and we will not mar the effect it is calculated to produce on sensitive and pious minds by adding any further observations of our own.
Years have vanished since, as wholly
As the little bower did then;
And you call it tender folly
That such thoughts should come again?
Ah! I cannot change this sighing for your smiling, brother-men! [p. 154→]
For this loss it did prefigure
Other loss of better good,
When my soul, in spirit-vigour,
And in ripened womanhood,
Fell from visions of more beauty than an arbour in a wood.
I have lost—oh, many a pleasure—
Many a hope, and many a power—
Studious health and merry leisure—
The first dew on the first flower!
But the first of all my losses was the losing of the bower.
I have lost the dream of Doing,
And the other dream of Done—
The first spring in the pursuing,
The first pride in the Begun—
First recoil from incompletion, in the face of what is won—
. . . . . . .
I have lost the sound child-sleeping
Which the thunder could not break;
Something too of the strong leaping
Of the staglike heart awake,
Which the pale is low for keeping in the road it ought to take.
Some respect to social fictions
Hath been also lost by me;
And some generous genuflexions,
Which my spirit offered free
To the pleasant old conventions of our false Humanity.
All my losses did I tell you,
Ye, perchance, would look away—
Ye would answer me, “Farewell! you
Make sad company to-day;
And your tears are falling faster than the bitter words you say.”
. . . . . . .
On this couch I weakly lie on,
While I count my memories,
Through the fingers which, still sighing,
I press closely on mine eyes—
Clear as once beneath the sunshine behold the bower arise.
Springs the linden-tree as greenly
Stroked with light adown its rind—
And the ivy-leaves serenely
Each in either intertwined,
And the rose-trees at the doorway, they have neither grown nor pined!
From those overblown faint roses,
Not a leaf appeareth shed,
And that little bud discloses
Not a thorn’s-breadth more of red,
For the winters and the summers which have passed me overhead.
And that music overfloweth,
Sudden sweet, the sylvan eaves;
Thrush or nightingale—who knoweth?
Fay or Faunus—who believes?
But my heart still trembles in me, to the trembling of the leaves.
Is the bower lost, then? Who sayeth
That the bower indeed is lost?
Hark! my spirit in it prayeth
Through the solstice and the frost—
And the prayer preserves it greenly, to the last and uttermost—
Till another open for me
In God’s Eden-land unknown,
With an angel at the doorway,
White with gazing at His Throne
And a saint’s voice in the palm-trees, singing—“All is lost . . . and won!”
[Samuel Ferguson]
Reviewed:
Poems (EBB), London: Edward Moxon, 1844.
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