So hush,—I will give you this leaf to keep:
See, I shut it inside the sweet cold hand!
There, that is our secret: go to sleep!
You will wake, and remember, and understand.
This poem, so exquisite in finish, well-nigh perfect in form, is one of the few works of our author, almost universally known and admired. It is doubtful, however, if all its admirers look beneath the form and finish, or understand much more of it than they do of other poems, the crabbed style of which repels admiration as strongly as this attracts it. The tender pathos of the “geranium leaf” in the first and last stanzas, touches a chord in every heart; but the thought of the piece is something far deeper and stronger, namely this, that true love is immortal, and that, therefore, however much it may fail of its object here, or even (if possible) in lives that follow this, it cannot fail for ever, it must find its object and be satisfied. It is a poem, not of the pathos of death, but of the promise of Life!
PROSPICE.
Fear death?—to feel the fog in my throat,
The mist in my face,
When the snows begin, and the blasts denote