SONG, BY TWO VOICES.
First Voice. Who is the baby that doth lie
Beneath the silken canopy
Of thy blue eye?
Second Voice. It is young Sorrow laid asleep
In the crystal deep.
Both. Let us sing his lullaby,
Heigho! a sob and a sigh.
First Voice. What sound is that, so soft, so clear,
Harmonious as a bubbled tear
Bursting, we hear?
Second Voice. It is young Sorrow, slumber breaking,
Suddenly waking.
Both. Let us sing his lullaby,
Heigho! a sob and a sigh.
They are not all dirges, these beautiful scraps of melody. Sometimes we come upon one as blithe as sunshine, like this serenade from the fine fragment called The Second Brother:
Strike, you myrtle-crownèd boys,
Ivied maidens, strike together:
Magic lutes are these whose noise
Our fingers gather,
Threaded thrice with golden strings
From Cupid's bow:
And the sounds of its sweet voice
Not air, but little busy things,
Pinioned with the lightest feather
Of his wings,
Rising up at every blow
Round the chords, like flies from roses
Zephyr-touched; so these light minions
Hover round, then shut their pinions,
And drop into the air, that closes
Where music's sweetest sweet reposes.
There is a song worthy of Ariel, whose delicate involutions well repay study, and whose perfect melody carries along the unfolding of the thought as easily and lightly as a swift stream sweeps along scattered rose-leaves. And here is another of the same dainty complexion, but simpler:
How many times do I love thee, dear?
Tell me how many thoughts there be
In the atmosphere
Of a new-fall'n year,
Whose white and sable hours appear
The latest flake of Eternity:
So many times do I love thee, dear.
How many times do I love again?
Tell me how many beads there are
In a silver chain
Of evening rain,
Unraveled from the tumbling main,
And threading the eye of a yellow star:
So many times do I love again.
Nor is it only the songs of Beddoes that ought to keep his memory alive among us, if his dramas are too long to enchain our fickle attention. We turn over the small collection of fragments that his stern judgment has spared from the material of his two finished plays, to come across thoughts like these, that would have made the best part of some less severe critic's pages:
I know not whether
I see your meaning: if I do, it lies
Upon the wordy wavelets of your voice
Dim as the evening shadow in a brook,
When the least moon has silver on't no larger
Than the pure white of Hebe's pinkish nail.
And many voices marshaled in one hymn
Wound through the night, whose still, translucent moments
Lay on each side their breath; and the hymn passed
Its long harmonious populace of words
Between the silvery silences.
Luckless man
Avoids the miserable bodkin's point,
And flinching from the insect's little sting,
In pitiful security keeps watch,
While 'twixt him and that hypocrite the sun.
To which he prays, comes windless Pestilence,
Transparent as a glass of poisoned water
Through which the drinker sees his murderer smiling:
She stirs no dust, and makes no grass to nod,
Yet every footstep is a thousand graves,
And every breath of hers as full of ghosts
As a sunbeam with motes.
There is an old saying that the workman may be known by his chips: surely from these chips we may gather a high opinion of that artificer who left such fragments to testify for him. For imaginative power of a very high order, for the true tragic spirit, for exquisitely melodious versification, for that faculty of song which is the flower of the lyric genius, Beddoes was pre-eminently distinguished. Nor for these alone. His style is based upon the rich vocabulary of the old dramatists, and is terse, pregnant and quaint, without any trace of affectation. There was a sturdy genuineness about the man that forbade him to assume, and his phraseology was the natural outgrowth of his mind and his early education. He has not gone to work, like so many of our modern pre-Raphaelite painters, to imitate crudeness of form in the vain hope of acquiring thereby earnestness and innocence of spirit; but he has studied the best tragic models in a reverent spirit, and allowed his muse to work out her own salvation. That grim ironical humor which infuses such bitter strength into the speeches of Isbrand was always scoffing at his own verses, and nipping the blossoms of his genius in the bud. "I believe I might have met with some success as a retailer of small coal," he writes to Mr. Kelsall, "or a writer of long-bottomed tracts, but doubt of my aptitude for any higher literary or commercial occupation."
His greatest weakness as a writer of tragedy has already been mentioned as one of which he was himself but too well aware—his inability to create characters that should have any more individual existence than as the mouthpieces of various sentiments. While holding that the proper aim of the dramatic writer should be to write for the stage, his dramas are nevertheless fitted only for the closet. "If it were possible," said George Darley (in the London Magazine, December, 1823), "speaking of a work of this kind (The Brides' Tragedy), to make a distinction between the vis tragica and the vis dramatica, I should say that he possessed much of the former, but little of the latter." As the beauties of his style—and they are many—recall to us the Shakespearian writers and the matchless riches of their verse, so do its faults—which are few—reflection that the author was unsuccessful because the critic was great. All critics, however, do not aspire to create, but all poets sooner or later attempt to criticise. Baudelaire, "the illustrious poet, the faultless critic," as Swinburne calls him, went still further. He said: "Tous les grands poëtes deviennent naturellement, fatalement, critiques. Je plains les poëtes que guide le seul instinct; je les crois incomplets. Il serait prodigieux qu'un critique devînt poëte, et il est impossible qu'un poëte ne contienne pas un critique." Yet a man cannot serve two masters, and Art is a jealous mistress who will not brook a rival. Even Beddoes found that his ideal of the physiologist-poet was fast slipping through his fingers, and confessed at last that were he "soberly and mathematically convinced" of his own inspiration, he would give himself up to the cultivation of literature. But he died at the early age of forty-six, from the effects of a wound received in the cause of Science. A singular retribution befell him, a truly poetic justice: all his scientific writings have disappeared—were either stolen before his executors had time to examine his papers, or had been destroyed by his own ruthless hand—and all that was left to keep his memory alive were the two tragedies and the few scattered fragments of verse of which he had made so little account during his lifetime. Their circle of readers has necessarily been small, but choice. There are few left, besides Browning and Proctor and John Forster, of his original admirers, and his name seems to be another on the long list of those who have failed, as the world counts failure. But the poets know better, and among their undying brotherhood space will always be kept for this strayed singer.
Kate Hillard.
HARVEST.
Gray orchards starred with fruitage gold and red,
Field beyond field of yellow-tasseled corn,
Rippling responsive to each breath of morn.
Along the Southern wall the dark vines shed
Their splendid clusters, blue-black and pale green,
With liquid sunshine through their thin films seen.
In yonder mead the haymakers at work
With lusty sounds the clear tense air fulfill,
Rearing the shapely hayrick's mimic hill,
The dried grass tossing with light-wielded fork.
Daylong the reapers glean the bladed gold;
High to the topmost orchard branches climb
The apple-gatherers, and from each limb
Shake the ripe globes of sweetness, downward rolled
Upon the leaf-strewn ground; and all day long
From the near vineyard comes the merry song
Of those who prune the stocks and tread the press.
The spirit melts beneath the mastering sense
Of supreme beauty and beneficence,
Power divine and awful gentleness.
No space for sadness in the heart to-day,
Seeing the generous, faithful earth fulfill
The springtide promise of vine, field and hill
When bush and hedge were rosy-flushed with May.
Yet at the threshold of fruition fain
We pause to catch the savor once again
Of sweet expectancy. The perfect year
In fourfold beauty rounds itself at length,
With golden fullness of developed strength,
Into the sure, complete, unswerving sphere.
This the result of frozen winter-rains,
Of hard, white snows, of dull, loud-dripping thaw,
Of showers and shine of spring, of March blasts raw,
Of glaring August heats,—these dainty grains,
This fruitage delicate. O sluggard soul!
What harvest reapest thou as seasons roll?
Mayhap to thee the slow results of time
Bring also profit, though thy fruit, hung high,
Escape the glance of careless passers-by,
A seeming fragile husk of empty rhyme.
Yet there are those who know what fed the root,
What long, dull tedium as of wintry hours,
What rapture as of spring-light after showers,
Went to the ripening of this strange, frail fruit.
Defeat and hope, disaster, joy and pain,
Grief, pleasure and despair—the same old train
That follows every soul. No grafted seed,
No alien harvest this, but a true part
Of the whole being—soul and pulse and heart—
That from the living bough is lightly freed.
Emma Lazarus.