—————————— some monitor unseen,
Calls for the song.—the call shall be obey’d;
For ’tis that silent monitor, I ween,
Which led my youth, to many a green-wood shade;
Show’d me the spring, in thousand blooms array’d,
And bade me look towards Heaven’s immensity:
This is a power that schoolmen never made,
That comes all unsolicited and free,
To fire the youthful bard—lo! this is Poesy!
The Song of the Patriot.
Robert Millhouse
——The talented author of the poem from whence the motto is extracted is scarcely known to fame, and not at all to fortune. His unostentatious little volume, entitled “The Song of the Patriot, Sonnets, and Songs,” was thrown accidentally in my way; and its perusal occasions me to acquaint the readers of the Table Book with its uncommon merit. I do not know any thing concerning the poet beyond what I have derived from printed particulars, which I now endeavour to diffuse. That he is highly esteemed by a discriminating brother bard in his native county, is apparent by the following beautiful address to him in the Nottingham Mercury:—
Stanzas.
My thoughts are of a solitary place,
Where twilight dwells, where sunbeams rarely fall;
And there a wild-rose hangs in pensive grace,
Reflected in a fountain clear and small;
Above them rise dark shadowy trees and tall,
Whilst round them grow rank night-shades in the gloom,
Which seem with noxious influence to pall
The fountain’s light, and taint the flower’s perfume;
As fainly they would mar what they might not out-bloom.
These, mind me, Millhouse! of thy spirit’s light,
That twilight makes in life so dark as thine!
And though I do not fear the rose may blight,
Or that the fountain’s flow may soon decline;
Hope, is there none, the boughs which frown malign,
High over-head, should let in heaven’s sweet face;
Yet shall not these their life unknown resign,
For nature’s votaries, wandering in each place,
Shall find their secret shade, and marvel at their grace.
It appears from a small volume, published in 1823, entitled “Blossoms—by Robert Millhouse—being a Selection of Sonnets from his various Manuscripts,” that the Rev. Luke Booker, LL. D. vicar of Dudley, deemed its author “a man whose genius and character seemed to merit the patronage of his country, while his pressing wants, in an equal degree, claimed its compassion.” The doctor “presumed to advocate his case and his cause” before the “Literary Fund,” and a donation honourable to the society afforded the poet temporary relief. This, says Millhouse, was “at a time when darkness surrounded me on every side.” In a letter to Dr. Booker, lamenting the failure of a subscription to indemnify him for publishing his poems, when sickness had reduced a wife and infant child to the borders of the grave, he says, “I am now labouring under indisposition both of body and mind; which, with the united evils of poverty and a bad trade, have brought on me a species of melancholy that requires the utmost exertions of my philosophy to encounter.” About this period he wrote the following:—
To a Leafless Hawthorn.
Hail, rustic tree! for, though November’s wind
Has thrown thy verdant mantle to the ground:
Yet Nature, to thy vocal inmates kind,
With berries red thy matron-boughs has crown’d
Thee do I envy: for, bright April show’rs
Will bid again thy fresh green leaves expand;
And May, light floating in a cloud of flow’rs,
Will cause thee to re-bloom with magic hand.
But, on my spring, when genial dew drops fell,
Soon did life’s north-wind curdle them with frost;
And, when my summer-blossom op’d its bell,
In blight and mildew was its beauty lost.