While vainly yet my ear another waits,
A sad, sweet longing lingers in my heart.
Is not that a magnificent production? How does it breathe of nature in her primitive loveliness, and how completely does it wean us from the world of flesh and blood into that other one of spiritual blessedness! How majestic, and yet how sweet is the flowing of its numbers!—reminding us of a strong but pleasant summer-evening wind, which is wont to make us strangely happy, even in our grief! Can anything be more completely exquisite than the few lines that I have marked? Is there anything in Dana, Bryant, or Longfellow, that can eclipse them? or even in the very best of England’s modern poets? There may be, but I have never been able to discover them, although I almost know by heart the poetry of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Wilson, Cowper, Goldsmith, Beattie, Shelly, Scott, Rogers, Campbell, and Mrs. Hemans.
Now comes “The Cripple Boy,” of its kind, one of the sweetest and most affecting things I ever read; and I willingly acknowledge that it has often blinded my eyes with tears. Such poetry softens the heart, and prepares us to sympathize with the unfortunate, and look with kindly feeling upon our fellows. It smooths the rugged pathway of life, by telling us that it is not the whole of life to live, nor the whole of death to die. We read, and our hearts cannot but be made wiser, even as the story of the Ancient Mariner made the heart of the Wedding Guest, and caused him to renounce his anticipated pleasure. Read and see.
Upon an Indian rush-mat, spread
Where burr-oak boughs a coolness shed,
Alone he sat,—a cripple-child,—
With eyes so large, so dark and wild,
And fingers, thin and pale to see,
Locked upon his trembling knee.