III. BETTINE TO GOETHE.
“Be friendly, pray, with these fancies of mine.” Bettine.
Could youth discrown thy head of its gray hair,
I could not love it as I love it now;
Could one grand line be smoothed from thy brow,
’Twould seem to me less stately and less fair.
O no, be as thou art! For thou dost wear
The signs of noble age that cannot bow
Thine intellect like thy form, and I who know
How each year that did visibly impair
Thy first fresh youth, left inwardly such grand
And gracious gifts, would rather have thee so—
Believe me, master, who erect doth stand
In soul and purpose, age cannot lay low
Till he receive, new from the Father’s hand
The youth he did but outwardly forego.
April, 1876.
Spring Song.
“O primavera! Gioventù dell’ anno.”
The first warm buds that break their covers,
The first young twigs that burst in green,
The first blade that the sun discovers,
Starting the loosened earth between.
The pale soft sky, so clear and tender,
With little clouds that break and fly;
The crocus, earliest pretender
To the low breezes passing by;
The chirp and twitter of brown builders,
A couple in a tree, at least;
The watchful wisdom of the elders
For callow younglings in the nest;
The flush of branches with fair blossoms,
The deepening of the faint green boughs,
As leaf by leaf the crown grows fuller
That binds the young Spring’s rosy brows;
New promise every day of sweetness,
The next bright dawn is sure to bring;
Slow breaking into green completeness,
Fresh rapture of the early Spring!
May, 1876.
Prophecies of Summer.
I found a wee leaf in the cleft
Where the half-melted ice had left
A sunny corner, moist and warm,
For it to bud, beyond all harm.
The wet, brown sod,
Long horned with ice, had slowly grown
So soft, the tender seedling blown
By Autumn winds, in earliest Spring
Sent through the sun-warmed covering,
Its little leaf to God.
I found it there, beneath a ledge,
The dawning Spring time’s fairest pledge,
And to my mind it dimly brought
The sudden, joyous, leafy thought
Of Summer-time.
I plucked it from the sheltered cleft
Which the more kindly ice had left.
Within my hand to drop and die,
But for its sweet suggestions, I
Revive it in a rhyme.
1876.
Song.
O Love, where are the hours fled,
The hours of our young delight?
Are they forever gone and dead,
Or only vanished out of sight?
O can it be that we shall live
To know once more the joys gone by,
To feel the old, deep love revive,
And smile again before we die?
Could I but fancy it might be,
Could I the past bring back again,
And for one moment, holding thee,
Forget the present and its pain!
O Love, those hours are past away
Beyond our longing and our sighs—
Perhaps the Angels, some bright day,
Will give them back in Paradise!
August, 1876.
Heaven.
Not over roof and spire doth Heaven lie,
Star-sentinelled from our humanity,
Beyond the humble reach of every day.
And only near us when we weep or pray;
But rather in the household and the street,
Where loudest is the noise of hurrying feet,
Where hearts beat thickest, where our duties call,
Where watchers sit, where tears in silence fall.
We know not, or forget, there is no line
That marks our human off from our divine;
For all one household, all one family
In different chamberings labouring are we;
God leaves the doors between them open wide,
Knowing how life and death are close allied,
And though across the threshold, in the gloom,
We cannot see into that other room,
It may be that the dear ones watching there
Can hear our cry of passionate despair,
And wait unseen to lead us through the door
When twilight comes, and all our work is o’er.
January, 1877.