One of the most highly finished of the legends is "A Tomb in Ghent," setting forth the life of a humble musician and his young daughter. It contains lovely touches of description both of music and architecture. How the youth knelt prayerfully in St. Bavon—
"While the great organ over all would roll,
Speaking strange secrets to his innocent soul,
Bearing on eagle-wings the great desire
Of all the kneeling throng, and piercing higher
Than aught but love and prayer can reach, until
Only the silence seemed to listen still;
Or, gathering like a sea still more and more.
Break in melodious waves at heaven's door.
And then fall, slow and soft, in tender rain,
Upon the pleading, longing hearts again."
Not only what he heard, but what he saw, is thus exquisitely imaged in words:
"Then he would watch the rosy sunlight glow.
That crept along the marble floor below,
Passing, as life does with the passing hours.
How by a shrine all rich with gems and flowers.
Now on the brazen letters of a tomb;
Then, again, leaving it to shade and gloom,
And creeping on, to show distinct and quaint,
The kneeling figure of some marble saint;
Or lighting up the carvings strange and rare
That told of patient toil and reverent care;
Ivy that trembled on the spray, and ears
Of heavy corn, and slender bulrush-spears.
And all the thousand tangled weeds that grow
In summer where the silver rivers flow:
And demon heads grotesque that seemed to glare
In impotent wrath on all the beauty there.
Then the gold rays up pillared shaft would climb.
And so be drawn to heaven at evening time;
And deeper silence, darker shadows flowed
On all around—only the windows glowed
With blazoned glory, like the shields of light
Archangels bear, who, armed with love and might,
Watch upon heaven's battlements at night."
The second critical division of Miss Procter's poems comprises those beautiful lyrics, many of which have been set to music, and all of which are full of the melody of rhythms—inspired, as it were, by a delicate AEolian harmony, having its source in the fine intangible instinct of the poet's ear. Amidst more than a hundred of such short poems and songs, selection seems nearly impossible to the critic. Many of the little pieces and many of the separate verses are destined to float on the surface of English literature with the same secure buoyancy as Herrick's "Daffodils," or Lyttleton's verses to his fair wife Lucy, or Wordsworth's picture of the maid who dwelt by the banks of Dove. They have that short felicity of expression, that perfect finish in their parts, that cause such poems to abide in the memory, or, as the expression is, to "dwell in the imagination." In the six verses of "The Chain,"
"Which was not forged by mortal hands.
Or clasped with golden bars and bands,
is one—the third—which exemplifies our assertion. It reads like one of those immemorial quotations we have known from infancy:
"Yet what no mortal hand could make.
No mortal power can ever break;
What words or vows could never do.
No words or vows can make untrue;
And if to other hearts unknown,
The dearer and the more our own,
Because too sacred and divine
For other eyes save thine and mine."
Two songs, written in the quaint, irregular metre delighted in by the seventeenth-century poets, seem like forgotten scraps by one of the more elegant contemporaries of Milton; these are, "A Doubting Heart," and "A Lament for the Summer," of which the first and last verses are instinct with the feelings of October days:
"Moan, O ye Autumn winds—
Summer has fled;
The flowers have closed their tender leaves, and die;
The lily's gracious head
All low must lie.
Because the gentle Summer now is dead.
Mourn, mourn, O Autumn winds—
Lament and mourn;
How many half-blown buds must close and die!
Hopes, with the Summer born,
All faded lie,
And leave us desolate and earth forlorn."