“Can trouble live with April days,
Or sadness in the summer moons?”
He would have the New Year bring all its customary flowers—
“Deep tulips dash’d with fiery dew,
Laburnums, dropping-wells of fire”—
a sight of these would set free the sorrow in his blood,
“And flood a fresher throat with song.”
LXXXIV.
This Poem is a very charming conception of what their lives might have domestically been, if Hallam had been spared. The picture is almost too beautiful: detailing more than life ever allows—and there came the crushing sorrow.
Engaged in marriage to the Poet’s sister,[57] death intervened—
“that remorseless iron hour
Made cypress of her orange flower,
Despair of Hope, and earth of thee.”
It is remarkable how the imagination of the Poet glows over the tender scenes of home affection, and the great results which he presumes were arrested by the removal of his friend, who he had hoped would have attained “to reverence and the silver hair” in company with himself—and then, in their full old age,