There is one other piece perhaps even sadder than this when we penetrate its full, stern significance:
The Requital.
Loud roared the tempest, fast fell the sleet;
A little child-angel passed down the street
With trailing pinions and weary feet.
The moon was hidden; no stars were bright;
So she could not shelter in heaven that night,
For the angels' ladders are rays of light.
She beat her wings at each window-pane,
And pleaded for shelter, but all in vain:
"Listen," they said, "to the pelting rain!"
She sobbed, as the laughter and mirth grew higher,
"Give me rest and shelter beside your fire,
And I will give you your heart's desire."
The dreamer sat watching his embers gleam,
While his heart was floating down hope's bright stream,
So he wove her wailing into his dream.
The worker toiled on, for his time was brief;
The mourner was nursing her own pale grief:
They heard not the promise that brought relief.
But fiercer the tempest rose than before,
When the angel paused at a humble door
And asked for shelter and help once more.
A weary woman, pale, worn, and thin,
With the brand upon her of want and sin,
Heard the child-angel and took her in.
Took her in gently, and did her best
To dry her pinions; and made her rest
With tender pity upon her breast.
When the eastern morning grew bright and red,
Up the first sunbeam the angel fled,
Having kissed the woman, and left her—dead.
Human waifs forgotten by all their kind are a sorrowful picture enough, but this of a human heart so desolate, so blank, so seared, so far from all hope or joy in life, that even God its Creator does not deny its supreme wish to die, is inexpressibly dreary. This is worthy to stand beside Tennyson's "Mariana in the Moated Grange."
One touch worth noticing is the fiction by which the angel is detained on earth; that "the angels' ladders are rays of light." It strikes us as one of the most ingenious we have ever met, and no less beautiful than happy. The whole structure of the narrative indeed, is admirable; it is difficult to see how the parts could be fitted more nicely. This skill Miss Procter has in an uncommon degree, and all her longer narrative poems exemplify it.
Of course, such thoughts on life as these last verses contain blend naturally with noble thoughts on death. Here, again, Miss Procter's prevailing thoughtfulness has developed her ideas into many beautiful applications. The lines called "The Angel of Death," which so touchingly close Charles Dickens's late sketch of her, the sweet, weary "Tryst with Death," and many others, are examples of this. But among them all there is none which more truly embodies her conceptions, or which, at the same time, is more deeply instinct with the hopefulness which underlies all her graver utterances, than the admirable lines:
Our Dead.
Nothing is our own; we hold our treasures
Just a little time ere they are fled:
One by one life robs us of our treasures:
Nothing is our own except our dead.
They are ours, and hold in faithful keeping,
Safe for ever, all they took away.
Cruel life can never stir that sleeping;
Cruel time can never seize that prey.
Justice pales, truth fades, stars fall from heaven:
Human are the great whom we revere;
No true crown of honor can be given,
Till we place it on a funeral bier.
How the children leave us, and no traces
Linger of that smiling angel hand;
Gone, for ever gone; and in their places
Weary men and anxious women stand.
Yet, we have some little ones, still ours;
They have kept the baby smile, we know,
Which we kissed one day, and hid with flowers,
On their dead white faces, long ago.
When our joy is lost—and life will take it—
Then no memory of the past remains,
Save with some strange, cruel sting, to make it
Bitterness beyond all present pains.
Death, more tender-hearted, leaves to sorrow
Still the radiant shadow, fond regret; We shall find, in some far bright to-morrow
Joy that he has taken, living yet.
"Is love ours, and do we dream we know it
Bound with all our heart-strings all our own?
Any cold and cruel dawn may show it
Shattered, desecrated, overthrown.
Only the dead hearts forsake us never:
Death's last kiss has been the mystic sign
Consecrating love our own for ever,
Crowning it eternal and divine.
So when Fate would fain besiege our city,
Dim our gold or make our flowers fall,
Death, the angel, comes in love and pity
And, to save our treasures, claims them all.
Her ideas regarding death are very lofty. They are equally removed from the timorous, painful harping on dissolution that characterizes the underdone poetic organism, from the graphic grimness of Miss Rossetti's class of thinkers, who seem to take a ghastly delight in anatomizing the subject, and last from the passionate weak welcoming of the end—the coward courage which dares not live. In a word, Miss Procter was a Christian.
In quitting her poems of thought, it will perhaps be well to pretermit our long course of praise, and speak of the faults of her writing, most of which are strongest in these very poems. In verbal correctness, she is far above the average; for so voluminous a writer, singularly free from them. Still, by G. Washington-Moon-light, we can discover certain errors, principally of accent or collocation. Some few appear in the verses we have cited. In "Beyond," "baptism" is made a trisyllable; though, standing where it does, an appeal might well be taken to the higher equity of rhythm against the arbitrary technicality of the law of orthoepy. Also, we doubt if "perfécted" be the best pronunciation to-day. And in "Homeless," in the expression,