Another noteworthy fact about her is also alluded to by Mr. Dickens. It is the total absence of humor, and the sober and shaded style of what she has written. He takes occasion, while speaking of this prevailing seriousness in one so young, expressly to bar the inference that she was of the melancholy moonlit sort, and mentions her abundant wit, and keen sense of the ludicrous, and the joyous quality of her laugh. We do not think an observant reader would misconceive her, as her kind-hearted biographer apprehended. She lacks the distinctive element of morbidness. There is a soundness in her sadness, so to speak, that makes us feel it to be the shadow of a soul that knows the sunshine also. Mournful people of the true chronic mournfulness show it far more by taking dismal views of ordinary subjects than by dealing only in dismal things. But the fact itself suggests a curious question which our aphorists have not yet answered. How is it that some men naturally rollick in print, while others, not less humorous, write nothing but the gravest stuff? What made Hood's pen merry on his death-bed, and took the wit so out of Sydney Smiths's sermons? These two classes are so marked that one would think there must be a principle of some sort dividing them. Yet no one has ever laid down this principle. We no more pretend to do this than the rest, but merely raise the question, leaving it to some future critic to disentangle us from a most Cartesian dubitation.
Thus far we have quoted mainly in illustration of Miss Procter's characteristics. It must not be inferred, however, that there are not in her books excellences not specially arising out of her peculiar ideas of life. On the contrary, there are a number of pieces of that provoking class of good things which we might just as well have written ourselves—only we didn't. Very few of our friends, though, would think of looking in an English author for the following strong, spirited protest, written in 1861, when it was proposed to "strengthen the hands" of the mission for the conversion of Irish Catholics:
An Appeal.
Spare her, O cruel England!
Thy sister lieth low:
Chained and oppressed she lieth;
Spare her that cruel blow.
We ask not for the freedom
Heaven has vouchsafed to thee,
Nor bid thee share with Ireland
The empire of the sea.
Her children ask no shelter—
Leave them the stormy sky;
They ask not for thy harvests,
For they know how to die;
Deny them, if it please thee,
A grave beneath the sod;
But we do cry, O England,
Leave them their faith in God!
Take, if thou wilt, the earnings
Of the poor peasant's toil;
Take all the scanty produce
That grows on Irish soil,
To pay the alien preachers
Whom Ireland will not hear—
To pay the scoffers at the creed
Which Irish hearts hold dear:
But leave them, cruel England,
The gift their God has given;
Leave them their ancient worship,
Leave them their faith in heaven.
You come and offer learning—
A mighty gift, 'tis true,
Perchance the greatest blessing,
That now is known to you;
But not to see the wonders
Sages of old beheld
Can they peril a priceless treasure,
The faith their fathers held.
For in learning and in science
They may forget to pray:
God will not ask for knowledge
On the great judgment day.
When, in their wretched cabins,
Racked by the fever pain.
And the weak cries of their children
Who ask for food in vain;
When, starving, naked, helpless,
From the shed that keeps them warm
Man has driven them forth to perish
In a less cruel storm;
Then, then we plead for mercy;
Then, sister, hear our cry;
For all we ask, O England,
Is—leave them there to die!
Cursed is the food and raiment
For which a soul is sold;
Tempt not another Judas
To barter God for gold.
You offer food and shelter
If they their faith deny;
What do you gain, O England!
By such a shallow lie?
We will not judge the tempted—
May God blot out their shame—
He sees the misery round them,
He knows man's feeble frame.
His pity still may save them.
In his strength they must trust
Who calls us all his children.
Yet knows we are but dust.
Then leave them the kind tending,
Which helped their childish years;
Leave them the gracious comfort
Which dries their mourner's tears;
Leave them to that great mother
In whose bosom they were born,
Leave them the holy mysteries
That comfort the forlorn;
And, amid all their trials,
Let the great gift abide,
Which you, O prosperous England!
Have dared to cast aside.
Leave them the pitying angels,
And Mary's gentle aid,
For which earth's dearest treasures
Were not too dearly paid.
Take back your bribes, then, England,
Your gold is black and dim;
And if God sends plague and famine,
They can die and go to him.
This is by far the most unpolished and unequal thing Miss Procter has ever written, and full of faults of detail. But, spite of loose texture and repetition, and weak lines, and identical rhymes, there is a strength in all the essential features, and a spirit everywhere, that contrast strongly with the patriotic effusions that we have had so much of these last few years.
Another poem which has incidentally attracted no little notice is Homeward Bound, which anticipates the whole plot of Enoch Arden so completely that some shallow people felt called upon to say a number of very foolish things about the coincidence when Enoch Arden came out. The chief differences are that the ship-wrecked hero is thrown on a desert island in the one and captured by Moors in the other. Enoch Arden also turns away from the agonizing picture of his forfeited home in silence, while Miss Procter's mariner reveals himself, kisses his wife once more as if she were his, and departs, leaving the very awkward bigamy question wide open behind him, and in general evincing a noble ignorance of the law of England. He also perpetrates the dramatic error of surviving in a state of marine vagrancy for a quarter of a century. But, though inferior to Tennyson's, this poem has many excellent touches of pathos and nature, and must claim, equally with Enoch Arden, the full merit of its simple yet most telling conception.
Apropos of resemblances, we are tempted to quote another of her best known poems, both for its real beauty and because it subtly reminds us of Longfellow, and we should be thankful if some one would only tell us why:
The Storm.
The tempest rages wild and high;
The waves lift up their voice and cry
Fierce answers to the angry sky.
Miserere Domine
Through the black night and driving rain,
A ship is struggling, all in vain,
To live upon the stormy main.
Miserere Domine
The thunders roar, the lightnings glare,
Vain is it now to strive or dare;
A cry goes up of great despair.
Miserere Domine
The stormy voices of the main,
The moaning wind and pelting rain
Beat on the nursery window-pane,
Miserere Domine
Warm curtained was the little bed,
Soft pillowed was the little head:
"The storm will wake the child," they said.
Miserere Domine
Cowering among his pillows white,
He prays, his blue eyes dim with fright,
"Father, save those at sea to-night!"
Miserere Domine
The morning shone all clear and gay
On a ship at anchor in the bay,
And on a little child at play.
Gloria tibi Domine!
Out of many which commend themselves, we select only one more, a little gem which we were surprised and pleased to find copied the other day in a little New York evening paper. We think it very suggestive and sweet.
A Lost Chord
Seated one day at the organ,
I was weary and ill at ease,
And my fingers wandered idly
Over the noisy keys.
I do not know what I was playing,
Or what I was dreaming then,
But I struck one chord of music
Like the sound of a great Amen.
It flooded the crimson twilight
Like the close of an angel's psalm,
And it lay on my fevered spirit
With a touch of infinite calm.
It quieted pain and sorrow,
Like love overcoming strife;
It seemed the harmonious echo
From our discordant life.
It linked all perplexed meanings
Into one perfect peace,
And trembled away into silence
As if it were loth to cease.
I have sought, but I seek it vainly,
That one lost chord divine,
That came from the soul of the organ,
And entered into mine.
It may be that Death's bright angel
Will speak in that chord again,
It may be that only in heaven
I shall hear that grand Amen.
We have yet to speak of one great element in these poems, their religion. With those who are born and bred in a church, their belief sits on them like their clothes—becomes a part of themselves. With converts it is oftener like a badge which they are proud to wear, and which some are fond of displaying. Miss Procter's was one of those rare natures in which religion seems to stain back, as it were, and color the very fountain-heads of all thought and impulse, as they are colored by the associations of childhood. In her, it was not like regalia for the processions of life or a reserve fund for emergencies, but thoroughly assimilated and vitalized; a living faith; an actual, practical element in her daily doings, as present in her consciousness as her own individuality. Nor had she any of the combativeness of converts, whose zeal is apt sometimes to be aggressively meek and intolerantly lowly. Hers was a faith full of the charity that judges not. Like all real feeling, it never obtrudes itself, and never shrinks from appearing in its proper place. Thus she has very few devotional and no sectarian pieces at all in her Legends and Lyrics, but once professedly entering on that line of thought, in her Chaplet of Verses, she is both Christian and Catholic throughout.