'There is pansies—that's for thoughts.'
Can the tender insight of the Imagination be more fully manifested than in the grief of Constance?
'And, father cardinal, I have heard you say
That we shall see and know our friends in heaven:
If that be true, I shall see my boy again;
For, since the birth of Cain, the first male child,
To him that did but yesterday suspire,
There was not such a gracious creature born.
But now will canker sorrow eat my bud,
And chase the native beauty from his cheek;
And he will look as hollow as a ghost,
As dim and meagre as an ague's fit;
And so he'll die; and, rising so again,
When I shall meet him in the court of heaven
I shall not know him: therefore, never—never—
Shall I behold my pretty Arthur more.
Grief fills the room up of my absent child,
Lies in his bed, walks up and down with me;
Puts on his pretty looks, repeats his words,
Remembers me of all his gracious parts,
Stuffs out his vacant garments with his form;
Then have I reason to be fond of grief.
O lord, my boy, my Arthur, my fair son!
My life, my joy, my food, my all the world!
My widow-comfort and my sorrow's cure.'
This is the impassioned but simple eloquence of Nature, and Nature's child: Shakspeare.
In these examples the reader will not fail to remark that the Imagination seems to gain much of its power from its love for and sympathy with the objects described. Not only are the objects with which it presents us truthfully rendered, but always lovingly treated.
With the Greeks, the Graces were also the Charities or Loves. It is the love for living things and the sympathy felt in them that induce the poet to give life and feeling to the plant, as Shelley to the 'Sensitive Plant;' as Shakspeare, when he speaks to us through the sweet voices of Ophelia and Perdita; as Wordsworth, in his poems to the Daisy, Daffodil, and Celandine; as Burns in his Mountain Daisy. As a proof of the power of the Imagination, through its Truth, and Love, to invest the lowest of God's creatures with interest, we offer the reader one of these simple songs of the heart.