“Save for th’ alleviation of my rhymes.”
The solace he takes in rhyme is like an open sluice for the pent-up emotions which he has not been allowed to pour directly into the harbor of her affections. But time goes on and finds her, he declares, “false in thy profession of love’s leaven,” and ever escaping from the persistent assaults of a determined but irreproachable wooing. “Yet ne’er lose hope, my heart,” he says:—
“Thou shalt succeed,
So thou persist in thy true quest, until
All barriers opposing thee do fall.”
And what barriers they were, obstructing the realization of this hope! Inconstant as the sea, with an almost diabolical power to delude and deceive, she seems to take infinite delight in raising the most sanguine expectations only to dash the joy in shattered fragments upon the ground of despair. Take Sonnet LXXI:—
“Thou camest unto me last eventide,
When the dull pain of absence had well-nigh
Made life for me one long-continued sigh—
. . . . . . . . . . . .
Oh! rapture to my soul, more sweet to me
Than glories to the conqueror of a nation!
Behold my dry heart, moistened at the sound
Of thy dear voice—none dearer could there be—
And my sad soul, once more within love’s station,
As thy fair form doth twine my heart around!”
Here at last seems the surrender. Now that her “fair form doth twine” around his heart, the very suddenness of victory inspires even in its joy a dubious misgiving; so hard won has it been, that all the past anxiety and pain robs it of half the exquisite realization the event should bring. Whether it is this, indeed, or a spirit of chastisement that the following Sonnet evokes, one does not dare positively to say:—
“Yet now I cannot with impunity
Receive the gilded pleasure of thy love.
God knoweth with what zeal for it I strove.
But when I feel love’s sweet community,
It bringeth to me the lost unity—
The loneliness.”
Despite the momentary doubt, however, the next six sonnets are rhapsodic in celebration of the perfect union of feeling that binds the two hearts. “For love at last walks hand in hand with me,” he sings. And there seems to lurk in all their association the atmosphere of a conviction that happiness is finally to crown their lives. But the charm is snapped. The woman has not yet “drunk the cup of worldly pleasure dry.” Betraying his trust again, she proves the fickle baseness of her nature. The wound she inflicts promises to be deep and lasting. The bitter cry in Sonnet LXXXVII, with its splendid opening line, pierces the heart with sympathy for this unhappy man:—
“God, through his offspring Nature, gave me love,
Though man in opposition saith me nay,
And taketh from my heart its life to-day,
As through the valley of the world I rove,
Still unaccompanied.”
From here on to the last Sonnet, the final stage of an unhappy experience is told in many keys of emotion. Somewhat detached, in his resignation to the inevitable, the man now turns upon his beloved a scrutiny of recollection which analyzes her physical and mental lineaments, and weighs each motive actuating her singular conduct. Fair in his judgments of her virtues, there is no hesitancy on his part to censure with rigor her distasteful faults. The good and the bad are so interwoven in her nature as not to be superficially discerned.