The following evinces a deeper feeling, and has a corresponding force and dignity in its elegance:—
Yes, "lower to the level"
Of those who laud thee now!
Go, join the joyous revel,
And pledge the heartless vow!
Go, dim the soul-born beauty
That lights that lofty brow!
Fill, fill the bowl! let burning wine
Drown in thy soul Love's dream divine!
Yet when the laugh is lightest,
When wildest goes the jest,
When gleams the goblet brightest,
And proudest heaves thy breast,
And thou art madly pledging
Each gay and jovial guest—
A ghost shall glide amid the flowers—
The shade of Love's departed hours!
And thou shalt shrink in sadness
From all the splendor there,
And curse the revel's gladness,
And hate the banquet's glare;
And pine, 'mid Passion's madness
For true love's purer air,
And feel thou'dst give their wildest glee
For one unsullied sigh from me!
Yet deem not this my prayer, love,
Ah! no, if I could keep
Thy alter'd heart from care, love,
And charm its griefs to sleep,
Mine only should despair, love,
I—I alone would weep!
I—I alone would mourn the flowers
That fade in Love's deserted bowers!
Among her poems are many which admit us to the sacredest recesses of the mother's heart: "To a Child Playing with a Watch," "To Little May Vincent," "To Ellen, Learning to Walk," and many others, show the almost wild tenderness with which she loved her two surviving daughters—one thirteen, and the other eleven years of age now;—and a "Prayer in Illness," in which she besought God to "take them first," and suffer her to lie at their feet in death, lest, deprived of her love, they should be subjected to all the sorrow she herself had known in the world, is exquisitely beautiful and touching. Her parents, her brothers, her sisters, her husband, her children, were the deities of her tranquil and spiritual worship, and she turned to them in every vicissitude of feeling, for hope and strength and repose. "Lilly" and "May," were objects of a devotion too sacred for any idols beyond the threshold, and we witness it not as something obtruded upon the outer world, but as a display of beautified and dignified humanity which is among the ministries appointed to be received for the elevation of our natures. With these holy and beautiful songs is intertwined one, which under the title of "Ashes of Roses," breathes the solemnest requiem that ever was sung for a child, and in reading it we feel that in the subject was removed into the Unknown a portion of the mother's heart and life. The poems of Mrs. Osgood are not a laborious balancing of syllables, but a spontaneous gushing of thoughts, fancies and feelings, which fall naturally into harmonious measures; and so perfectly is the sense echoed in the sound, that it seems as if many of her compositions might be intelligibly written in the characters of music. It is a pervading excellence of her works, whether in prose or verse, that they are graceful beyond those of any other author who has written in this country; and the delicacy of her taste was such that it would probably be impossible to find in all of them a fancy, a thought, or a word offensive to that fine instinct in its highest cultivation or subtlest sensibility. It is one of her great merits that she attempted nothing foreign to her own affluent but not various genius.
There is a stilted ambition, common lately to literary women, which is among the fatalest diseases to reputation. She was never betrayed into it; she was always simple and natural, singing in no falsetto key, even when she entered the temples of old mythologies. With an extraordinary susceptibility of impressions, she had not only the finest and quickest discernment of those peculiarities of character which give variety to the surface of society, but of certain kinds and conditions of life she perceived the slightest undulations and the deepest movements. She had no need to travel beyond the legitimate sphere of woman's observation, to seize upon the upturnings and overthrows which serve best for rounding periods in the senate or in courts of criminal justice—trying everything to see if poetry could be made of it. Nor did she ever demand audience for rude or ignoble passion, or admit the moral shade beyond the degree in which it must appear in all pictures of life. She lingered with her keen insight and quick sensibilities among the associations, influences, the fine sense, brave perseverance, earnest affectionateness, and unfailing truth, which, when seen from the romantic point of view, are suggestive of all the poetry which it is within the province of woman to write.
I have not chosen to dwell upon the faults in her works; such labor is more fit for other hands, and other days; and so many who attempt criticism seem to think the whole art lies in the detection of blemishes, that one may sometimes be pardoned for lingering as fondly as I have done, upon an author's finer qualities. It must be confessed, that in her poems there is evinced a too unrestrained partiality for particular forms of expression, and that—it could scarcely be otherwise in a collection so composed—thoughts and fancies are occasionally repeated. In some instances too, her verse is diffuse, but generally, where this objection is made, it will be found that what seems most careless and redundant is only delicate shading: she but turns her diamonds to the various rays; she rings no changes till they are not music; she addresses an eye more sensitive to beauty and a finer ear than belong to her critics. The collection of her works is one of the most charming volumes that woman has contributed to literature; of all that we are acquainted with the most womanly; and destined, for that it addresses with truest sympathy and most natural eloquence the commonest and noblest affections, to be always among the most fondly cherished Books of the Heart.
Reluctantly I bring to a close these paragraphs—a hasty and imperfect tribute, from my feelings and my judgment, to one whom many will remember long as an impersonation of the rarest intellectual and moral endowments, as one of the loveliest characters in literary or social history. Hereafter, unless the office fall to some one worthier, I may attempt from the records of our friendship, and my own and others' recollections, to do such justice to her life and nature, that a larger audience and other times shall feel how much of beauty with her spirit left us.
This requiem she wrote for another, little thinking that her friends would so soon sing it with hearts saddened for her own departure.