I found her where a flowering tree
Gave odors and cool shade. Her cheek
A little rested on her hand;
Her rustic skill had made a band
Of rare device which garlanded
The beauty of her bending head;
Some maiden thoughts most kind and wise
Were dimly burning in her eyes.
When I beheld her—form and face
So lithe, so fair—the spirit race,
Of whom the better poets dream'd,
Came to my thought, and I half deem'd
My earth-born mistress, pure and good,
Was some such lady of the wood,
As she who work'd at spell, and snare,
With Huon of the dusky hair,
And fled, in likeness of a doe,
Before the fleet youth Angelo.
But these infirm imaginings
Flew quite away on instant wings.
I call'd her name. A swift surprise
Came whitely to her face, but soon
It fled before some daintier dyes,
And, laughing like a brook in June,
With sweet accost she welcomed me.
It was a golden day to me,
And its great bliss is with me yet,
Warming like wine my inmost heart——
For memories of happy hours
Are like the cordials press'd from flowers,
And madden sweetly.
Then the poet recited ancient lays which tell some natural tales; and then:
Pity look'd lovely in the maiden;
Her eyes were softer, when so laden
With the bright dew of tears unshed.
But I was somewhat envious
That other bards should move her thus,
And oft within myself had said,
"Yea—I will strive to touch her heart
With some fair songs of mine own art"——
And many days before the day
Whereof I speak, I made essay
At this bold labor. In the wells
Of Froissart's life-like chronicles
I dipp'd for moving truths of old.
A thousand stories, soft and bold,
Of stately dames, and gentlemen,
Which good Lord Berners, with a pen
Pompous in its simplicity,
Yet tipt with charming courtesy,
Had put in English words, I learn'd;
And some of these I deftly turn'd
Into the forms of minstrel verse.
I know the good tales are the worse—
But, sooth to say, it seems to me
My verse has sense and melody——
Even that its measure sometimes flows
With the brave pomp of that old prose.
It was a good while before the promised contents of the book were sent to us, and Cooke wrote of the delay to a friend:
"Procrastination is a poison of my very marrow. Moreover, since 'the first wisping of the leaf,' my whole heart has been in the woods and the waters—every rising sun that could be seen, I have seen, and I never came in from my sport until too much used up to do more than adopt this epitaph of Sardanapalus: 'Eat, drink,' &c. Moreover (2d), Mr. Kennedy and others were poking me in the ribs eternally about my poems; and I was driven to the labor of finishing them. I groaned and did it, and sent them to Griswold, and have left the task of carrying them through the press to him; and only lie passive, saying with Don Juan (in the slave-market of Adrianople, or some other place), 'would to God somebody would buy me.'"
At length through his cousin and friend, John P. Kennedy—(a name that makes one in charity with all mankind)—the MS. of all the poems was sent to us. It makes a book about the size of the printed volume, written with a regular elegance to match that of the old copyists. In an accompanying letter he says:
... "They are certainly not in the high key of a man warm with his subject, and doing the thing finely; I wrote them with the reluctance of a turkey-hunter kept from his sport—only Mr. Kennedy's urgent entreaty and remonstrance whipped me up to the labor. You will hardly perceive how they should be called "Ballads." You are somewhat responsible for the name. I designed (originally) to make them short poems of the old understood ballad cast. I sent you the proem, which you published as a preface to the "Froissart Ballads." Words in print bore a look of perpetuity (or rather of fixedness) about them, and what I would have changed if only my pen and portfolio had been concerned, your type deterred me from changing. The term "Froissart Ballads," however, is after all correct, even with the poems as they are. The Master of Bolton is as much a song as the Lay of the Last Minstrel, although I have no prologue, interludes, &c., to show how it was sung; and as for Orthone, &c. Sir John Froissart may as easily be imagined chanting them as talking them."
Again he wrote:
"You will find them beneath your sanguine prognostic. They are mere narrative poems, designed for the crowd. Poetic speculation, bold inroads upon the debatable land—"the wild weird clime, out of space out of time"—I have not here attempted. I will hereafter merge myself in the nobler atmosphere; in the mean time I have stuck to the ordinary level, and endeavored to write interesting stories in verse, with grace and spirit. I repeat my fear that in writing for the cold, I have failed to touch the quick and warm—in writing for a dozen hunting comrades, who have been in the habit of making my verse a post prandium entertainment, and never endured an audacity of thought or word, I have tamed myself out of your approbation."
The book was at length published, but though reviewed very favorably by the late Judge Beverly Tucker, in the Southern Literary Messenger, and by Mr. Poe, in the American Review, and much quoted and praised elsewhere, it was, on the whole, not received according to its merits or our expectations. Yet the result aroused the author's ambition, and after a few weeks he remarked in a letter: