"Passion and mystery murmur through the leaves,
Passion and mystery, touched by deathless pain,
Whose monotone of long, low anguish grieves
For something lost that shall not live again.">[
[Footnote 15: Hayne's very careful workmanship is rarely at fault; but here there seems to be an infelicitous epithet that amounts to a sort of tautology. "Eyes ablaze" would necessarily "look forth with burning gaze.">[
[Footnote 16: This poem illustrates the poet's method of dealing with Nature. He depicts its beauty as discerned by the artistic imagination. He is less concerned with the messages of Nature than with its lovely forms. This poem, in its felicitous word-painting, reminds us of Tennyson, though it would be difficult to find in the English poet so brilliant a succession of masterly descriptions.
With this poem may be compared Hayne's Cloud Fantasies, a sonnet that brings before us, with great vividness, the somber appearance of the clouds in autumn. See also A Phantom in the Clouds. No other of our poets has dwelt so frequently and so delightfully on the changing aspects of the sky.
Compare Shelley's The Cloud.]
[Footnote 17: It is not often that Hayne assumed the hortatory tone found in this poem. In artistic temperament he was akin to Keats rather than to Longfellow. Even in his didactic poems, he is meditative and descriptive rather than hortatory. The artist in him hardly ever gave place to the preacher.]
[Footnote 18: The seraph's name was Uriel, that is, God's Light. In Revelation (xix. 17) we read, "And I saw an angel standing in the sun." Milton calls him—
"The Archangel Uriel—one of the seven
Who in God's presence, nearest to his throne,
Stand ready at command."
—Paradise Lost, Book III, 648-650.]
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