And who Him love, in potence great or small,
Are, one and all,
Heirs of the Palace glad
And only clad
With the bridal robes of ardor virginal.”
The Love that our poet has been seeking, has found, and here hymns in strains that at times are truly little short of seraphic, will now be known to the reader; and we leave this high, ethereal Court of Love that is human indeed, yet more than human, to glance at other and more ordinary, though still lofty, subjects which the poet has touched.
In a sense it is really refreshing to find that he is not always in the skies; that he is very human and made of flesh and blood like ourselves. Indeed, so human is he that he openly confesses, in a poem of matchless beauty and delicacy, to having found a substitute for his dead wife. Ordinary men, who are not poets, yet who nevertheless have hearts, will give a rough reading to the exquisite ode, “Tired Memory” (p. 93), wherein the poet, lamenting his wife, and confessing truthfully, albeit sadly, that
“In our mortal air
None thrives for long upon the happiest dream,”
and seeking round “for some extreme of unconceived, interior sacrifice, whereof the smoke might rise to God,” cries in agony: