“A night-long Present of the Past,”
by reviving in a dream of the night a tour they had made together “thro’ summer France.”
The Poet asks that, if sleep has “such credit with the soul,” as to produce this temporary illusion; it may be farther extended by giving him a stronger opiate, so as to make his pleasure complete, in prolonging this renewal of their pedestrian tour, and reviving other cherished associations.
This reference to their foreign excursion recalls the charming verses, “In the Valley of Cauteretz,” which evidently relate to their being together during this happy holiday:
“All along the valley, stream that flashest white,
Deepening thy voice with the deepening of the night,
All along the valley, where thy waters flow,
I walk’d with one I loved two-and-thirty years ago.
All along the valley, while I walk’d to-day,
The two-and-thirty years were a mist that rolls away;
For all along the valley, down thy rocky bed,
Thy living voice to me was as the voice of the dead,
And all along the valley, by rock and cave and tree,
The voice of the dead was a living voice to me.”
LXXII.
The dreams are over, and he addresses the sad anniversary of Hallam’s death, which took place on the 15th of September, 1833—the day having just dawned with stormy accompaniments. The poplar tree[47] is blown white, through having its leaves reversed by the wind; and the window-pane streams with rain. It is a day on which his “crown’d estate,” his life’s happiness, began to fail; and that the rose is weighed down by rain, and the daisy closes her “crimson fringes,”[48] are effects quite in harmony with his feelings.
But, if the day had opened with no wind, and the sun had chequered the hill sides with light and shadow; it would still have looked
“As wan, as chill, as wild as now.”
It is a disastrous “day, mark’d as with some hideous crime,” he can therefore only say, “hide thy shame beneath the ground,” in sunset, when the recalling anniversary will be past.