EDITOR’S TABLE.
Miss Barrett.—In this number will be found a series of sonnets by Miss Elizabeth B. Barrett, among the first of her contributions to any American periodical. They were originally intended for “Arcturus,” to which magazine they were sent; but arriving after the discontinuance of that periodical, its editors placed them at our disposal, “thinking the good company into which they would be introduced in ‘Graham,’ would be every way agreeable to the fair authoress.”
Miss Barrett’s productions are unique in this age of lady authors. They have the “touch of nature” in common with the best; they have, too, sentiment, passion and fancy in the highest degree, without reminding us of Mrs. Hemans, Mrs. Norton, or L. E. L. Her excellence is her own; her mind is colored by what it feeds on; the fine tissue of her flowing style comes to us from the loom of Grecian thought. She is the learned poetess of the day, familiar with Homer and Æschylus and Sophocles, and to the musings of Tempe she has added the inspiration of Christianity, “above all Greek, all Roman fame.” She has translated the Prometheus to the delight of scholars, and has lately contributed a series of very remarkable prose papers to the London Athenæum. Her reading Greek recalls to us Roger Ascham’s anecdote of Lady Jane Grey; but Lady Jane Grey has left us no such verses.
A striking characteristic of Miss Barrett’s prose, is its prevailing seriousness, approaching to solemnity—a garb borrowed from the “sceptred pale” of her favorite Greek drama of fate. She loses much with the general reader by a dim mysticism; but many of her later poems are free from any such defect. The great writers whom she loves will teach her the plain, simple, universal language of poetry.
Her dreams and abstractions, though “caviare to the generale,” have their admirers, who will ever find in pure and elevated philosophy expressed in the words of enthusiasm the living presence of poetry. On Parnassus there are many groves: far from the dust of the highway, embosomed in twilight woods that seem to symbol Reverence and Faith trusting on the unseen, we may hear in the whispering of the trees, the wavering breath of insect life, the accompaniment of our poet’s strain. Despise not dreams and reveries. With Cowley, Miss Barrett vindicates herself. “The father of poets tells us, even dreams, too, are from God.”
We cannot here do justice to Miss Barrett’s volume of the Seraphim, or to her other poems. We cannot here illustrate as we would the lofty tone of her conceptions, which in grandeur and human interest belong to the highest and most enduring of lyrical strains. She has thrown aside sentimentality, the fluency without thought, the cheap eloquence that marks a certain school of lady poets, for the genuine language of emotion, the fire-new currency of speech forged in the secret chambers of the heart. From two volumes of her poetry before us, (unfamiliar as yet to American readers—they cannot be so long,) we quote one poem, perhaps not the most brilliant of all, but inferior to none of the rest in the pathos, the tenderness, the deep Christian sympathy with human life, which dwell in the soul of this rare poetess.
THE SLEEP.
“He giveth His beloved sleep.”—Psalm cxxvii. 2.
Of all the thoughts of God that are