But there is another theory, which says that genius is that which possesses the faculty of incarnating universal affections in a type readily and instinctively appropriated by the imagination; that it painted the Huguenots, and wrought out the image of Jeanie Deans; that it sung the simple melody of "Auld Robin Gray," and accumulated the massive choruses of Handel; that—putting aside those greatest men, the Shakespeares, Groethes, and Raphaels, regarding whom criticism or definition are alike exhaustless and for ever inconclusive—the most admirable genius is that which thrills in the ballads, the religions literature, and imitative art of a people, and which a whole nation "will not willingly let die." Such genius, such art, is like the fair sunshine upon corn-fields, the rippling of the running stream, the silver surface of the lake, the profuse luxuriance of spring and autumn woodlands. It embodies light, air, and the song of birds, the solemnity of the universal twilight, and the radiance of the universal dawn. Almost every one can see and feel it in some wise, though the keenness of the appreciation will be in proportion to the sensitiveness of the eye and ear. Who shall deny that this is another and equally true description of the highest genius and the noblest art?
The poems we are now considering, and which have won such general admiration wherever they have become known, belong to the latter class of works of art. Their simple, delicate beauty appeals alike to men and women, and to the soul of the young child; their transparent clearness is that of an unusually lucid intellect; their profoundness is only that of a believing heart. She who wrote them would often say, with a certain characteristic simplicity, "I only write verses—I do not write poetry;" and would fasten upon the products of some powerful and mystic mind as an illustration of what genuine poetry ought to be. But the mis-estimate was great. The absolute absence of claptrap, of any appeal to the passions of the hour or the popular idols of the English people, showed that if these volumes lay on so many tables, and their contents were so often sung and quoted in public and in private, as expressing just that which everybody had wanted to say, the reason lay deeper than the ring of the verse-writer who knows how to play into the fancy of the multitude. They are popular because they are instinct with dainty feminine genius, and reach the hearts of others with the sure precise touch of slender fingers awakening the silver chords of a harp.
Three volumes originally comprised the whole of Miss Procter's writings: a first and second series of legends and lyrics, and one of religious poems, published for a night-refuge [{841}] kept by Sisters of Mercy. The two former have now been printed in this rich quarto by Messrs. Bell & Daldy; and it may not be amiss to say that the whole three have been republished in America in one small but excellently got-up volume, at once a casket and a shrine (Ticknor & Fields, Boston). Of the secular poems now brought before our English public in so beautiful a dress, we would attempt a slight analysis of contents. There are fourteen legends or stories, long and short—little tales in verse, of which the gist generally lies in some very subtle and pathetic situation of the human heart. Anything like violent wrong or the ravages of unruly passion seemed rarely to cross this gentle imagination; and yet the legends are nearly all sorrowful; but the sorrow seems to spring from nobody's fault and perhaps for that very reason it is all the more sorrowful, for repentance will not wash it away. Little dead children borne to heaven on the bosom of the angels while their mothers weep below; or a dying mother, dying amidst the splendors of an earl's home, and calling to her bedside the son of an earlier and humbler marriage, revealing herself to him at the last; or the history of a stepmother, long loved but late wedded, and who had given up the lover of her own youth to a younger friend, and afterward taken the charge of that friend's jealous and reluctant children; or the pitiful tale, since elaborately wrought out by Tennyson in his "Enoch Arden," of the sailor who returns home to find his wife the wife of another man. In one and all the pathos is wrought out and expressed with the most extraordinary delicacy of touch. The reader says to himself, "Nay, is it so sad after all?" And yet it is; sad and spiritually hopeful too; sad for this earth, hopeful for heaven. This seems the irresistible conclusion of almost every tale; even the story of the stepmother, supposed to come quite right at last, is made inexpressibly plaintive by being told by the first wife's nurse—she who "knew so much," and had lived with her young mistress from childhood, and would not call the cold husband unkind; "but she had been used to love and praise."
In others of these legends the telling of the tale is simpler, the pathos more direct, but almost always strangely subtle. In "Three Evenings of a Life" a sister sacrifices her own hopes of married life that she may devote herself to a young brother who needs her care. But the young brother marries—a catastrophe which she does not seem to have contemplated; and she finds too late that her sacrifice was useless; and, what was worse, that the bride is ill-fitted to sustain him in his life or in his art; and the unhappy sister
"——watched the daily failing
Of all his nobler part;
Low aims, weak purpose, telling
In lower, weaker art.
And now, when he is dying,
The last words she could hear
Must not be hers, but given
The bride of one short year.
The last care is another's;
The last prayer must not be
The one they learnt together
Beside their mother's knee."
Herbert sickens and dies, leaving the poor weak little Dora to Alice's care; and we are told how Alice cherishes her, and bears with her waywardness through sad weeks of depression, till news comes in spring that Leonard—the rejected lover—is returning from India. Now Alice is free! Now she may love Leonard and lean upon his strength. He comes; the little household smiles once more. Summer succeeds to spring; when one twilight hour Alice is aware of the perfume of flowers brought into their London home. She goes out into the passage, and through a half-opened door hears Leonard's voice:
"His low voice—Dora's answers;
His pleading;—yes, she knew
The tone, the words, the accents;
She once had heard them too.
'Would Alice blame her? Leonard's
Low tender answer came.
'Alice was far too noble
To think or dream of blame.'
'And wishes sure he loved her?'
'Yes, with the one love given
Once in a lifetime only;
With one soul and one heaven?'
Then came a plaintive murmur:
'Dora had once been told
That he and Alice—' 'Dearest,
Alice is far too cold
To love: and I, my Dora,
If once I fancied so,
It was a brief delusion.
And over long ago.'"
Very tender and touching is the description of the forlorn woman's recoil upon her brother's memory:
"Yes, they have once been parted;
But this day shall restore
The long-lost one; she claims him:
'My Herbert—mine once more!'"