“Oh! it is hard to take to heart
The lesson that such deaths will teach,
But let no man reject it,
For it is one that all must learn,
And is a mighty, universal Truth.
When Death strikes down the innocent and young,
For every fragile form from which he lets
The parting spirit free,
A hundred virtues rise,
In shapes of mercy, charity, and love,
To walk the world and bless it.
Of every tear
That sorrowing mortals shed on such green graves
Some good is born, some gentler nature comes.”
Not a ward of the original is changed in the above quotation, which is worthy of the best passages in Wordsworth, and thus, meeting on the common ground of a deeply truthful sentiment, the two most dissimilar men in the literature of the century are brought into the closest approximation.
Something of a similar kind of versification in prose may be discovered in Chapter LXXVII. of “Barnaby Rudge,” and there is an instance of successive verses in the Third Part of the “Christmas Carol,” beginning
“Far in this den of infamous resort.”
The following is from the concluding paragraph of “Nicholas Nickleby”:—
“The grass was green above the dead boy’s grave,
Trodden by feet so small and light,
That not a daisy droop’d its head
Beneath their pressure.
Through all the spring and summer time
Garlands of fresh flowers, wreathed by infant hands,
Rested upon the stone.”
The following stanzas, entitled “A Word in Season,” were contributed by Mr. Dickens in the winter of 1843 to an annual edited by his friend and correspondent, the Countess of Blessington. Since that time he has ceased to write, or at any rate to publish anything in verse.
This poem savours much of the manner of Robert Browning. Full of wit and wisdom, and containing some very remarkable and rememberable lines, an extract from it will fitly close this chapter of our volume.
A WORD IN SEASON.
BY CHARLES DICKENS.“They have a superstition in the East,
That Allah, written on a piece of paper,
Is better unction than can come of priest
Of rolling incense, and of lighted taper:
Holding, that any scrap which bears that name,
In any characters, its front impress’d on,
Shall help the finder thro’ the purging flame,
And give his toasted feet a place to rest on.“So have I known a country on the earth,
Where darkness sat upon the living waters,
And brutal ignorance, and toil, and dearth
Were the hard portion of its sons and daughters:
And yet, where they who should have oped the door
Of charity and light, for all men’s finding,
Squabbled for words upon the altar-floor,
And rent The Book, in struggles for the binding.” [341]