A ray beams upon me
From heart to heart ranging;
For me there is sunshine
Unclouded, unchanging.
—Translated by Sir Edwin Arnold.
In the autumn, when the golden leaves lay thick on the ground, she would wander for hours in the rustling foliage and listen to the sound it made. It had a voice which spoke to her. Each ray of sunshine which lighted up the forest or the long sweeps of country before her, each blade of grass, light and air, birds and flowers, had a personal meaning for her. She returned with her head full of poetic thoughts, and wrote down what the forest, the storm, the sun, and the birds had confided to her.
“Thou forest-scent! Thou forest-song!
Sounds, perfumes, freshly borne along,
How sweet to me you are!
How glad grow heart and ear for you!
What joy you bring, and comfort too,
Unto our little Star!”
—Translated by Sir Edwin Arnold.
With such strains of poetry Princess Elizabeth calmed her excited fancy. But no one was to know that she secretly wrote these little verses. It was a deep secret which she “hid from the books on the shelf and even the air in the room.”
“So lived I in spirit,
Lonely, my own hidden life, by none to be known of;
Never a sound, nor cloud-picture, but brought to my fancy
Matter for thought without end, and a keen-edged emotion.”
—Translated by Sir Edwin Arnold.
It is possible that many people would have different ideas as to the freedom that should be accorded to a Princess’s daughter from those of the wise mother, who, looking deeper, had discovered the right way of calming this passionate and peculiar character. “We must let her go her own way and not disturb the working within,” she wrote to a friend at the time. The Prince met her great spirit of contradiction on the same principle. When his daughter insisted on having her way he used to say, “You cannot force people to their happiness, but must let them come to a sense of it.”
From her sixteenth year Princess Elizabeth began to write her poems regularly in a book. The gifted child, with her restless feelings, thoughtful and penetrating in her judgment of the world around her, now put all her ideas and emotions into the poems which she wrote almost involuntarily, and which now became her journal. In her fear not to be true, she never wrote them down first, and never altered what was written, “because she had originally thought it out in those words.”