The earliest note we heard the cuckoo sing,
Or the first daisy that we ever pluck’d,
When thoughts themselves were stars, and birds, and flowers,
Pure brilliance, simplest music, wild perfume.
My copy of the book was printed in 1827. It had the date 1856 under the old owner’s name; and I suppose that not many editions have been published since 1827, or any since 1856. Yet this individual character of the writer, original as much in degree as in kind, had kept the book alive. The energy of his ecstasy gave his blank verse a gushing flow that may cause sleep, but seldom impatience, and never contempt. The overflowing of so many lines into an extra unaccented syllable seemed a natural effect of his possession by his subject, and not a device or a mere habit. At its best it had the eloquence of an improvisation.
As I shut this book it reminded me of a poem called To Deck a Woman, by Mr. Ralph Hodgson, where a similar rapt picture of a manless Eden is painted, but with a passion that is controlled to a quivering repose by an art finer than Montgomery’s. There the passion is double, for the poet’s love of the life and beauty of birds is turned to an anger too deep for hate against the woman Bloodwant, “shrill for Beauty’s veins,” and the men who satisfy—and provoke—her desire for feathers. The same poet’s Stupidity Street is a curious instance of passion submitting itself to the quietest of smiling rhymes:—
I saw with open eyes
Singing birds sweet
Sold in the shops for
The people to eat,