and I learned and loved her "Better Land," and
"If thou hast crushed a flower,"
and "Kindred Hearts."
I wonder if Miss Landon really did write that fine poem to Mont Blanc which was printed in her volume, but which sounds so entirely unlike everything else she wrote! This was one of my window-gems. It ended with the appeal,—
"Alas for thy past mystery!
For thine untrodden snow!
Nurse of the tempest! hast thou none
To guard thine outraged brow?"
and it contained a stanza that I often now repeat to myself:—
"We know too much: scroll after scroll
Weighs down our weary shelves:
Our only point of ignorance
Is centred in ourselves."
There was one anonymous waif in my collection that I was very fond of. I have never seen it since, nor ever had the least clue to its authorship. It stirred me and haunted me; and it often comes back to me now, in snatches like these:—
"The human mind! That lofty thing,
The palace and the throne
Where Reason sits, a sceptred king,
And breathes his judgment-tone!"
"The human soul! That startling thing,
Mysterious and sublime;
An angel sleeping on the wing,
Worn by the scoffs of time.
From heaven in tears to earth it stole—
That startling thing, the human soul."