Here is one little poem I think most valuable, both from its fulness of meaning, and the form, as clear as condensed, in which that is embodied.
ON AN INFANT
Which died before baptism.
"Be rather than be called a child of God,"
Death whispered. With assenting nod,
Its head upon its mother's breast
The baby bowed without demur—
Of the kingdom of the blest
Possessor, not inheritor.
Next the father let me place the gifted son, Hartley Coleridge. He was born in 1796, and died in 1849. Strange, wayward, and in one respect faulty, as his life was, his poetry—strange, and exceedingly wayward too—is often very lovely. The following sonnet is all I can find room for:—
"SHE LOVED MUCH."
She sat and wept beside his feet. The weight
Of sin oppressed her heart; for all the blame,
And the poor malice of the worldly shame,
To her was past, extinct, and out of date;
Only the sin remained—the leprous state.
She would be melted by the heat of love,
By fires far fiercer than are blown to prove
And purge the silver ore adulterate.
She sat and wept, and with her untressed hair
Still wiped the feet she was so blest to touch;
And he wiped off the soiling of despair
From her sweet soul, because she loved so much.
I am a sinner, full of doubts and fears:
Make me a humble thing of love and tears.
CHAPTER XXII.
THE FERVOUR OF THE IMPLICIT. INSIGHT OF THE HEART.
The late Dean Milman, born in 1791, best known by his very valuable labours in history, may be taken as representing a class of writers in whom the poetic fire is ever on the point, and only on the point, of breaking into a flame. His composition is admirable—refined, scholarly, sometimes rich and even gorgeous in expression—yet lacking that radiance of the unutterable to which the loftiest words owe their grandest power. Perhaps the best representative of his style is the hymn on the Incarnation, in his dramatic poem, The Fall of Jerusulem. But as an extract it is tolerably known. I prefer giving one from his few Hymns for Church Service.