Nature is often, in her verse, as it must be to any sympathetic mind, a keener source of pain than of pleasure, instinct as it is with memories, and flaunting before one’s thwarted dreams the infallible fulfilment of its hopes; yet she has
for it an intense passion, and enters into its most delicate and undefined moods with swift comprehension.
“The Soul of the Violet,” previously referred to, is an illustration in point, being a purely subjective treatment of a nature-suggestion. When spring is yet too young for promise of bloom, and only in the first respite from the snow,
The brown earth raises a wistful face—
Whenever about the fields I go,
The soul of the violet haunts me so!
I look—there is never a leaf to be seen;
In the pleachéd grass is no thread of green;
But I walk as one who would chide his feet
Lest they trample the hope of something sweet!