And meet a maiden fair and fond
Expecting me beneath a tree
Of shade for two, but not for three.
Ah, my old Yew, far out of view,
Why must I bid you both adieu?”[47]
At Oxford he was a marked man for his cleverness and for his audacities; these last brought him to grief there, and going home upon his rustication, he quarrelled with his father. Thereafter we find him in London, where he publishes his first little booklet of poems (1795); only twenty then; counted a fierce radical; detesting old George III. with his whole heart; admiring the rebel George Washington and declaring it; loving the French, too, with their liberty and fraternity song, until it was silenced by the cannonading of Napoleon; thenceforward, he counts that people a nation of “monkeys, fit only to be chained.”
But Landor never loved London. We find him presently wandering by the shores of Wales, and among its mountains. Doubtless he takes his cast-net with him; the names of Ianthé and Ioné decorate occasional verses; a certain Rose Aylmer he encounters, too, who loans him a book (by Clara Reeve), from a sketch in which he takes hint for his wild, weird poem of Gebir, his first long poem—known to very few—perhaps not worth the knowing. It is blind in its drift; war and pomp and passion in it—ending with a poisoned cup; and contrasting with these, such rural beatitudes as may be conjured under Afric skies, with tender love-breezes, ending in other beatitudes in coral palaces beneath the sea. This, at any rate, is the phantasmic outline which a reading leaves upon my own memory. Perhaps another reader may be happier.
That shadowy Rose Aylmer, through whom the suggestion for the poem came, was the real daughter of Lord Aylmer, of the near Welsh country; what Landor’s intimacy with her may have been, in its promise or its reach, we do not know; but we do know that when she died, somewhat later and in a far country, the poet gave her name embalmment in those wonderful little verses, which poor Charles Lamb, it is said, in his later days, would repeat over and over and over, never tiring of the melody and the pathos. Here they are:—
“Ah, what avails the sceptred race,
Ah, what the form divine!