They are not all dirges, these beautiful scraps of melody. Sometimes we come upon one as blithe as sunshine, like this serenade from the fine fragment called The Second Brother:
Strike, you myrtle-crownèd boys,
Ivied maidens, strike together:
Magic lutes are these whose noise
Our fingers gather,
Threaded thrice with golden strings
From Cupid's bow:
And the sounds of its sweet voice
Not air, but little busy things,
Pinioned with the lightest feather
Of his wings,
Rising up at every blow
Round the chords, like flies from roses
Zephyr-touched; so these light minions
Hover round, then shut their pinions,
And drop into the air, that closes
Where music's sweetest sweet reposes.
There is a song worthy of Ariel, whose delicate involutions well repay study, and whose perfect melody carries along the unfolding of the thought as easily and lightly as a swift stream sweeps along scattered rose-leaves. And here is another of the same dainty complexion, but simpler:
How many times do I love thee, dear?
Tell me how many thoughts there be
In the atmosphere
Of a new-fall'n year,
Whose white and sable hours appear
The latest flake of Eternity:
So many times do I love thee, dear.
How many times do I love again?
Tell me how many beads there are
In a silver chain
Of evening rain,
Unraveled from the tumbling main,
And threading the eye of a yellow star:
So many times do I love again.
Nor is it only the songs of Beddoes that ought to keep his memory alive among us, if his dramas are too long to enchain our fickle attention. We turn over the small collection of fragments that his stern judgment has spared from the material of his two finished plays, to come across thoughts like these, that would have made the best part of some less severe critic's pages:
I know not whether
I see your meaning: if I do, it lies
Upon the wordy wavelets of your voice
Dim as the evening shadow in a brook,
When the least moon has silver on't no larger
Than the pure white of Hebe's pinkish nail.
And many voices marshaled in one hymn
Wound through the night, whose still, translucent moments
Lay on each side their breath; and the hymn passed
Its long harmonious populace of words
Between the silvery silences.
Luckless man
Avoids the miserable bodkin's point,
And flinching from the insect's little sting,
In pitiful security keeps watch,
While 'twixt him and that hypocrite the sun.
To which he prays, comes windless Pestilence,
Transparent as a glass of poisoned water
Through which the drinker sees his murderer smiling:
She stirs no dust, and makes no grass to nod,
Yet every footstep is a thousand graves,
And every breath of hers as full of ghosts
As a sunbeam with motes.
There is an old saying that the workman may be known by his chips: surely from these chips we may gather a high opinion of that artificer who left such fragments to testify for him. For imaginative power of a very high order, for the true tragic spirit, for exquisitely melodious versification, for that faculty of song which is the flower of the lyric genius, Beddoes was pre-eminently distinguished. Nor for these alone. His style is based upon the rich vocabulary of the old dramatists, and is terse, pregnant and quaint, without any trace of affectation. There was a sturdy genuineness about the man that forbade him to assume, and his phraseology was the natural outgrowth of his mind and his early education. He has not gone to work, like so many of our modern pre-Raphaelite painters, to imitate crudeness of form in the vain hope of acquiring thereby earnestness and innocence of spirit; but he has studied the best tragic models in a reverent spirit, and allowed his muse to work out her own salvation. That grim ironical humor which infuses such bitter strength into the speeches of Isbrand was always scoffing at his own verses, and nipping the blossoms of his genius in the bud. "I believe I might have met with some success as a retailer of small coal," he writes to Mr. Kelsall, "or a writer of long-bottomed tracts, but doubt of my aptitude for any higher literary or commercial occupation."