And a thousand bright-veined flowers,
From their banks of moss and fern,
Breathe of the sunny hours—
But when wilt thou return?
Oh! thou hast wandered long
From thy home without a guide;
And thy native woodland song
In thine altered heart hath died.
Thou hast flung the wealth away,
And the glory of thy spring;
And to thee the leaves' light play
Is a long-forgotten thing.
There is something very touching in the simplicity of these pleasures, contrasted with what imagination immediately suggests of the career and the tastes of the prodigal.
One great spectacle in nature alone, seems strangely to have lost its fascination upon our poetess—she never kindled to the sea. She seemed to view it as the image only of desolation and of ruin; to have associated it only with tempests and wreck, and have seen in it only the harmless waste of troubled waters. More than once she adopts a scriptural phrase—"And there shall be no more sea," as an expression of singular joy and congratulation. We question whether a single reader of her poems has ever felt the force of the expression as she did. The sea, next to the sky, is the grandest and most beautiful thing given to the eyes of man. But, by some perverse association, she never saw it in its natural beauty and sublimity, but looked at it always as the emblem of ruthless and destroying power. In The Last Song of Sappho, it is singular how much more the dread sea, into which Sappho is about to fling herself, possesses her imagination than the moral tempest within of that hapless poetess:—
Sound on, thou dark unslumbering sea!
Sound in thy scorn and pride!
I ask not, alien world, from thee
What my own kindred earth has still denied.
. . . . .
Yet glory's light hath touched my name,
The laurel-wreath is mine—
With a lone heart, a weary frame,
O restless deep! I come to make them thine!
Give to that crown, that burning crown,
Place in thy darkest hold!
Bury my anguish, my renown,
With hidden wrecks, lost gems, and wasted gold.
And with what an indignant voice, and with what a series of harshest epithets, does she call upon the sea to deliver up its human prey, in the fine spirited poem, called—
THE TREASURES OF THE DEEP.