The love of Nature is ever returned double to us, not only the delighter in our delight, but by linking our sweetest, but of themselves perishable feelings to distinct and vivid images, which we ourselves, at times, and which a thousand casual recollections, recall to our memory. She is the preserver, the treasurer of our joys. Even in sickness and nervous diseases, she has peopled our imagination with lovely forms which have sometimes overpowered the inward pain and brought with them their old sensations. And even when all men have seemed to desert us and the friend of our heart has passed on, with one glance from his "cold disliking eye"—yet even then the blue heaven spreads it out and bends over us, and the little tree still shelters us under its plumage as a second cope, a domestic firmament, and the low creeping gale will sigh in the heath-plant and soothe us by sound of sympathy till the lulled grief lose itself in fixed gaze on the purple heath-blossom, till the present beauty becomes a vision of memory.
HESPERUS
I have never seen the evening star set behind the mountains, but it was as if I had lost a hope out of my soul, as if a love were gone, and a sad memory only remained. O it was my earliest affection, the evening star! One of my first utterances in verse was an address to it as I was returning from the New River, and it looked newly bathed as well as I. I remember that the substance of the sonnet was that the woman whom I could ever love would surely have been emblemed in the pensive serene brightness of that planet, that we were both constellated to it, and would after death return thither.
TO THE EVENING STAR
TO THE EVENING STAR
O meek attendant of Sol's setting blaze,
I hail, sweet star, thy chaste effulgent glow;
On thee full oft with fixed eye I gaze,
Till I methinks, all spirit seem to grow.
O first and fairest of the starry choir,
O loveliest 'mid the daughters of the night,
Must not the maid I love like thee inspire
Pure joy and calm delight?
Must she not be, as is thy placid sphere,
Serenely brilliant? Whilst to gaze awhile
Be all my wish 'mid Fancy's high career
E'en till she quit this scene of earthly toil;
Then Hope perchance might fondly sigh to join
Her image in thy kindred orb, O star benign!
[First printed from MS. Poetical and Dramatic Works, 1877-80; Poetical Works, 1893, p. 11.]
HEALTH, INDEPENDENCE, FRIENDSHIP