Imagini ale paginilor
PDF
ePub

64

"SAPPHO SURVIVES, BECAUSE WE SING HER SONGS,-(BROWNING)

ROBERT BROWNING.

VII.

I loved you, Evelyn, all the while!

My heart seemed full as it could hold—

There was place and to spare for the frank young smile
And the red young mouth and the hair's young gold.
So, hush-I will give you this leaf to keep—

See, I shut inside the sweet cold hand.
There, that is our secret: go to sleep;

You will wake, and remember, and understand.

["The words of 'Evelyn Hope' are the words of a dreamer; but the utterance is wrung out of the sorrow of death; and its keynote is a hope for the fulfilment of love in other lives, not the knowledge of love in this life. The mind of the speaker walks ever with the touch of God upon his brow, under the brooding wings of God, who keeps him safe from wounding. For that which God made good shall in the end have its purpose in being good; and no least earthly beauty, no little flower, no white sun ray, no gold hair, red mouth, pure brow, shall go unhonoured to darkness and the grave."-J. T. Nettleship, Essays on Robert Browning's Poetry.]

"BY THE SPIRIT, WHEN AGE SHALL O'ERCOME THEE, THOU STILL SHALT ENJOY-R. BROWNING)

MORE INDEED THAN AT FIRST WHEN UNCONSCIOUS, THE LIFE OF A BOY."-ROBERT BROWNING.

[blocks in formation]

Now that April's there!

And whoever wakes in England

Sees, some morning, unaware,

That the lowest boughs and the brushwood sheaf
Round the elm-tree bole are in tiny leaf,
While the chaffinch sings on the orchard-bough
In England-now.

II.

And after April, when May follows,

And the white-throat builds, and all the swallows!

AND AESCHYLUS, BECAUSE WE READ HIS PLAYS."-R. BROWNING.

"GOD IS SEEN GOD IN THE STAR, IN THE STONE, IN THE FLESH, IN THE SOUL, AND THE CLOD."-BROWNING.

66

'MEN ARE NOT ANGELS, NEITHER ARE THEY BRUTES:-(BROWNING)

HOME THOUGHTS FROM ABROAD.

Hark! where my blossomed pear-tree in the hedge
Leans to the field and scatters on the clover

Blossoms and dew-drops-at the bent spray's hedge-
That's the wise thrush; he sings each song twice over,
Lest you should think he never could recapture

The first fine careless rapture!

"That's the wise thrush; he sings each song twice over.")
And though the fields look rough with hoary dew,
All will be gay when noontide wakes anew
The butter-cups, the little children's dower-
Far brighter than this gaudy melon-flower!

[From the Collected Edition of his Poems, in 3 vols.]

SOMETHING WE MAY SEE, ALL WE CANNOT SEE."-R. BROWNING.

65

"WIN THE NEXT WORLD'S REWARD AND REPOSE, BY THE STRUGGLE IN THIS."-ROBERT BROWNING.

[graphic]

66 SWIFT AS A WEAVER'S SHUTTLE FLEET OUR YEARS:-(R. BROWNING)

[blocks in formation]

HOME THOUGHTS FROM THE SEA.

OBLY, nobly Cape Saint Vincent to the north-west
died away;

Sunset ran, one glorious blood-red, reeking into
Cadiz Bay,

Bluish 'mid the burning water; full in face Trafalgar lay;

"I BELIEVE IT! 'TIS THOU, GOD, THAT GIVEST; 'TIS I WHO RECEIVE;-(R. BROWNING)

IN THE FIRST IS THE LAST, IN THY WILL IS MY POWER TO BELIEVE."-ROBERT BROWNING.

[graphic][merged small]

In the dimmest north-east distance, dawned Gibraltar grand

and gray;

"Here and here did England help me; how can I help Eng-
land?"-say,

Whoso turns as I, this evening, turn to God to praise and pray,
While Jove's planet rises yonder, silent over Africa.

[From the Collected Edition of his Poems, in 3 vols.]

* Off Cape Saint Vincent the British, under Jervis and Nelson, won the great sea-fight against the Spanish, on the 14th February, 1796.

MAN GOETH TO THE GRAVE, AND WHERE IS HE?"

"-ROBERT BROWNING.

"LIFE'S INADEQUATE TO JOY, AS THE SOUL SEES JOY, TEMPTING LIFE to take."=bobert BroWNING,

"ADMIRATION GROWS AS KNOWLEDGE GROWS."-R. BROWNING.

[blocks in formation]

HE rain and the wind ceased, and the sky

Received at once the full fruition

Of the moon's consummate apparition.
The black cloud-barricade was riven,

Ruined beneath her feet, and driven
Deep in the west; while, bare and breathless,
North and south and east lay ready

For a glorious thing that, dauntless, deathless,
Sprang across them and stood steady.
'Twas a moon-rainbow, vast and perfect,
From heaven to heaven extending, perfect
As the mother-moon's self, face to face.
It rose, distinctly, at the base

With its seven proper colours chorded,
Which still, in rising, were compressed,
Until at last they coalesced,

And supreme the spectral creature lorded
In a triumph of the whitest white-
A bow which intervened the night.
But above night, too, like only the next,
The second of a wondrous sequence,
Reaching in rare and rarer frequence,
Till the heavens of heavens were circumflext.
Another rainbow rose, a mightier,

Fainter, flushier, and flightier—

Rapture dying along its verge!
Oh, whose foot shall I emerge,

Whose, from the straining topmast dark,
On the keystone of that arc?

[From the Collected Edition of his Poems, in 3 vols.]

66 THY LIFE STAYS IN THE POEMS MEN SHALL SING."-IBID.

"AND MY WHOLE SOUL REVOLVES, THE WORLD AND LIFE'S TOO BIG TO PASS FOR A DREAM."-BROWNING.

"AH! THE LAMPS NUMBERLESS, THE MYSTICAL JEWELS OF GOD, AND-R. BUCHANAN)

68

"SAD THINGS IN THIS LIFE OF BREATH-(BUCHANAN)

ROBERT BUCHANAN.

Robert Buchanan.

[ROBERT BUCHANAN was born on the 18th of August 1841. He received his education at the High School and University of Glasgow, and removing to London in or about 1860, embraced a literary career. His principal works are:-" Undertones" (1860); "Idyls and Legends of Inverburn" (1865); "London Poems" (1866); "North Coast Poems" (1867); "David Gray, and other Essays" (1868); the "Book of Orm" (1870); and “Napoleon Fallen" (1871).

A writer in The Spectator (July 1866) thus warmly and appreciatively criticises this young but growing poet, whose successive works exhibit a marked advance in depth and breadth of thought and range of expression :

"Mr. Buchanan is far more than a minor poet. The volume before us would seem to prove that there is scarcely any eminence short of the very highest in our poetic literature which he may not hope to reach. He has not shown as yet the highest order of lyrical genius nor the highest fertility of dramatic conception, but his peculiar province is the union of lyrical with dramatic conceptions, so that he seems, to use a mathematical metaphor, to hit the locus of the points of intersection between the genius of Wordsworth and the genius of Browning. Thus he combines many of the beauties of Wordsworth with something of the dramatic vivacity and realism of Mr. Browning; and the glory of nature gives a sweetness, a melody, and a melancholy to his verses, which is seldom or never to be found in Browning's shrewd, loquacious 'apologies' for all sorts of characters. The lyrical poet is far deeper and sweeter in Mr. Buchanan than in Mr. Browning."]

THE LUMINOUS, WONDERFUL, BEAUTIFUL LIGHTS OF THE VEIL!"-ROBERT BUCHANAN.

UP IN AN ATTIC.

ALF of a gold ring bright,
Broken in days of old;
One yellow curl, whose light
Gladdened my gaze of old;

A heather-sprig thereto,
Pluckt on the mountains blue,
When, in the shade and dew,

We roamed erratic;

Last, an old book of song,—
These have I treasured long,
Up in an attic.

ARE TRUEST, SWEETEST, DEEPEST."-ROBERT BUCHANAN.

« ÎnapoiContinuă »