Apropos of this superiority, we find another poem which illustrates it even more strongly, because so very many women have fluttered about the same thought. Every femme incomprise—and what poetess does not think she is one? is full of it; why have none of them said it so broadly and well as this?
Unexpressed.
Dwells within the soul of every artist
More than all his effort can express,
And he knows the best remains unaltered,
Sighing at what we call his success.
Vainly he may strive; he dare not tell us
All the sacred mysteries of the skies:
Vainly he may strive; the deepest beauty
Cannot be unveiled to mortal eyes.
And the more devoutly that he listens,
And the holier message that is sent,
Still the more his soul must struggle vainly,
Bowed beneath a noble discontent.
No great thinker ever lived and taught you
All the wonder that his soul received;
No true painter ever set on canvas
All the glorious vision he conceived.
No musician ever held your spirit
Charmed and bound in his melodious chains,
But be sure he heard, and strove to render
Feeble echoes of celestial strains.
No real poet ever wove in numbers
All his dream, but the diviner part,
Hidden from all the world, spake to him only
In the voiceless silence of his heart.
So with love; for love and art united
Are twin mysteries; different, yet the same:
Poor, indeed, would be the love of any
Who could find its full and perfect name.
Love may strive, but vain is the endeavor
All its boundless riches to unfold;
Still its tenderest, truest secret lingers
Ever in its deepest depths untold.
Things of time have voices, speak and perish:
Art and love speak, but their words must be
Sighings of illimitable forests,
Waves of an unfathomable sea.
The positive merit of this—passing the odious business of comparison—is, to our mind, the well-managed amplification of the main thought, and the swell both of sense and sound at the close, which we find a beauty of high order. The last two lines especially seize the melodic principle of the metre, which, beyond almost any other we know, calls for long musical words. Only "voiceless silence" strikes one as tautological to the last degree. Miss Proctor very rarely makes outright mistakes, and she may have seen some subtle sense added by the word "voiceless" that we cannot. All the silences we have ever known were strictly voiceless, and decidedly apt to terminate about the time any voice began.
The next great topic with our poetess is the sweet uses of adversity. She is never weary of celebrating the beauty and benignity of sorrow. In fact, she appears to have a personal friendship for misfortune, as the great elevating and purifying dispensation of earthly existence. Grief, disappointment, death, are to her philosophy but natural incidents, to be expected and met without fear—processes tending to the higher result hereafter. But here is her whole thought, better set forth than we can say it:
Friend Sorrow.
Do not cheat thy heart and tell her
Grief will pass away,
Hope for fairer times in future
And forget to-day.
Tell her, if you will, that sorrow
Need not come in vain,
Tell her that the lesson taught her
Far outweighs the pain.
Cheat her not with the old comfort,
"Soon she will forget:"
Bitter truth, alas! but matter
Rather for regret.
Bid her not "Seek other pleasures,
Turn to other things:"
Rather nurse her caged sorrow
Till the captive sings.
Rather bid her go forth bravely
And the stranger greet,
Not as foes with spear and buckler,
But as dear friends meet;
Bid her with a strong clasp hold her
By her dusky wings,
Listening for the murmured blessing
Sorrow always brings.
This is only one of a large number of poems full of varied exposition of these same views. Some are so ingenious and happy that we can hardly resist quoting them, were it not that, if those were the only qualifications, we should have to cite the major part of her poems. In fact, this conception of sorrow as a hidden blessing is peculiarly strong in all she has written. And yet, while recognizing in tribulation an elevating grace that wins it a welcome from her heart, she fully feels the sadness, the weariness, the poverty and pain of earthly lives. A strong instance of this is the "Cradle Song of the Poor," with its singular, sad refrain:
"Sleep, my darling, thou art weary,
God is good, but life is dreary."
And the miseries of the poor have evoked the only bitter lines she ever wrote, which, coming, as they do, the very last in her book, seem almost like an after-addition—the strange strong lines called "Homeless." There is a force in some of the lines that reminds us of Hood:
It is cold, dark midnight, yet listen
To that patter of tiny feet!
Is it one of your dogs, fair lady,
Who whines in the bleak, cold street?
Is it one of your silken spaniels
Shut out in the snow and the sleet?
My dogs sleep warm in their baskets,
Safe from the darkness and snow;
All the beasts in our Christian England
Find pity wherever they go.
(Those are only the homeless children
Who are wandering to and fro.)
Look out in the gusty darkness:
I have seen it again and again,
That shadow, that flits so slowly
Up and down past the window-pane:
It is surely some criminal lurking
Out there in the frozen rain!
Nay, our criminals all are sheltered,
They are pitied and taught and fed:
That is only a sister-woman,
Who has got neither food nor bed:
And the Night cries, "Sin to be living;"
And the River cries, "Sin to be dead."
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