....*....*....*....*
'Tis not the living colours over each,
By Nature's finest pencil wrought,
To shame the fresh-blown rose and blooming peach,
And mock the happiest painter's thought;
But 'tis that gentle mind, that ardent love
So kindly answering my desire,—
That grace with which you look, and speak, and move!
That thus have set my soul on fire.
To Dr. Parnell's[69] love for his wife (Anne Minchin), we owe two of the most charming songs in our language; "My life hath been so wondrous free," and that most beautiful lyric, "When your beauty appears," which, as it is less known, I give entire,
When your beauty appears
In its graces and airs,
All bright as an angel new dropt from the skies,
At distance I gaze, and am aw'd by my fears,
So strangely you dazzle my eyes.
But when without art,
Your kind thoughts you impart,
When your love runs in blushes through every vein;
When it darts from your eyes, when it pants at your heart,
Then I know that you're woman again.
"There's a passion and pride,
In our sex," she replied;
"And thus, might I gratify both, I would do,—
Still an angel appear to each lover beside,
But still be a woman for you!"
This amiable and beloved wife died after a union of five or six years, and left her husband broken-hearted. Her sweetness and loveliness, and the general sympathy caused by her death, drew a touch of deep feeling from the pen of Swift, who mentions the event in his journal to Stella: every one, he says, grieved for her husband, "they were so happy together." Poor Parnell did not, in his bereavement, try Lord Lyttelton's specifics: he did not write an elegy, nor a monody, nor did he marry again;—and, unfortunately for himself, he could not subdue his mind to religious resignation. His grief and his nervous irritability proved too much for his reason: he felt what all have felt under the influence of piercing anguish,—a dread, a horror of being left alone: he flew to society; when that was not at hand, he sought relief from excesses which his constitution would not bear, and died, unhappy man! in the prime of life; "a martyr," as Goldsmith tells us, "to conjugal fidelity."
FOOTNOTES:
[64] See his Poems.
[65] Johnson's Life of Lord Lyttelton.
[66] See in his Poems,—the lines beginning