The Poems of Felicia Hemans
Therefore my childhood’s once-loved scene
Around me faded lies;
Therefore, remembering what hath been,
I ask, is this mine early paradise?
It is, it is--but Thou art gone;
Or if the trembling shade
Breathe yet of thee, with alter’d tone
Thy solemn whisper shakes a heart dismay’d.
[431] Suggested by the late Mrs Fletcher’s story of _The Lost Life_,
published in the _Amulet_ for 1830.
TROUBADOUR SONG.
They rear’d no trophy o’er his grave,
They hade no requiem flow;
What left they there to tell the brave
That a warrior sleeps below?
A shiver’d spear, a cloven shield,
A helm with its white plume torn,
And a blood-stain’d turf on the fatal field,
Where a chief to his rest was borne.
He lies not where his fathers sleep,
But who hath a tomb more proud?
For the Syrian wilds his record keep,
And a banner is his shroud.
THE ENGLISH BOY.
“Go, call thy sons; instruct them what a debt
They owe their ancestors; and make them swear
To pay it, by transmitting down entire
Those sacred rights to which themselves were born.”
Akenside.
Look from the ancient mountains down,
My noble English boy!
Thy country’s fields around thee gleam
In sunlight and in joy.
Ages have roll’d since foeman’s march
Pass’d o’er that old, firm sod;
For well the land hath fealty held
To freedom and to God!
Gaze proudly on, my English boy!
And let thy kindling mind
Drink in the spirit of high thought
From every chainless wind!
There, in the shadow of old Time,
The halls beneath thee lie
Which pour’d forth to the fields of yore
Our England’s chivalry.
How bravely and how solemnly
They stand, midst oak and yew!
Whence Cressy’s yeomen haply framed
The bow, in battle true.
And round their walls the good swords hang
Whose faith knew no alloy,
And shields of knighthood, pure from stain:
Gaze on, my English boy!
Gaze where the hamlet’s ivied church
Gleams by the antique elm,
Or where the minster lifts the cross
High through the air’s blue realm.
Martyrs have shower’d their free heart’s blood
That England’s prayer might rise,
From those gray fanes of thoughtful years,
Unfetter’d, to the skies.
Along their aisles, beneath their trees,
This earth’s most glorious dust,
Once fired with valour, wisdom, song,
Is laid in holy trust.
Gaze on--gaze farther, farther yet--
My gallant English boy!
Yon blue sea bears thy country’s flag,
The billows’ pride and joy!
Those waves in many a fight have closed
Above her faithful dead;
That red-cross flag victoriously
Hath floated o’er their bed.
They perish’d--this green turf to keep
By hostile tread unstain’d,
These knightly halls inviolate,
Those churches unprofaned.
And high and clear their memory’s light
Along our shore is set,
And many an answering beacon-fire
Shall there be kindled yet!
Lift up thy heart, my English boy!
And pray, like _them_ to stand,
Should God so summon _thee_, to guard
The altars of the land.
TO THE BLUE ANEMONE.
Flower of starry clearness bright!
Quivering urn of colour’d light!
Hast thou drawn thy cup’s rich dye
From the intenseness of the sky?
From a long, long fervent gaze
Through the year’s first golden days,
Up that blue and silent deep,
Where, like things of sculptured sleep,
Alabaster clouds repose,
With the sunshine on their snows?
Thither was thy heart’s love turning,
Like a censer ever burning,
Till the purple heavens in thee
Set their smile, Anemone?
Or can those warm tints be caught
Each from some quick glow of thought?
So much of bright _soul_ there seems
In thy bendings and thy gleams,
So much thy sweet life resembles
That which feels, and weeps, and trembles,
I could deem thee spirit-fill’d,
As a reed by music thrill’d,
When thy being I behold
To each loving breath unfold,
Or, like woman’s willowy form,
Shrink before the gathering storm!
I could ask a _voice_ from thee,
Delicate Anemone!
Flower! thou seem’st not born to die
With thy radiant purity,
But to melt in air away,
Mingling with the soft Spring-day,
When the crystal heavens are still,
And faint azure veils each hill,
And the lime-leaf doth not move,
Save to songs that stir the grove,
And earth all glorified is seen,
As imaged in some lake serene;
--Then thy vanishing should be,
Pure and meek Anemone!
Flower! the laurel still may shed
Brightness round the victor’s head;
And the rose in beauty’s hair
Still its festal glory wear;
And the willow-leaves drop o’er
Brows which love sustains no more:
But by living rays refined,
Thou, the trembler of the wind,
Thou the spiritual flower,
Sentient of each breeze and shower,
Thou, rejoicing in the skies,
And transpierced with all their dyes;
Breathing vase, with light o’erflowing,
Gem-like to thy centre glowing,
Thou the poet’s type shalt be,
Flower of soul, Anemone!
SCENES AND PASSAGES FROM GOETHE.
SCENES FROM “TASSO.”
[One of the many literary projects contemplated by Mrs Hemans at this
time, was a series of German studies, consisting of translations
of scenes and passages from some of the most celebrated German
authors, introduced and connected by illustrative remarks. The only
one of these papers which she ever completed, was that on Goethe’s
“Tasso,” published in the _New Monthly Magazine_ for January 1834; a
paper which well deserves attention, as it embodies so much of her
individual feeling with respect to the high and sacred mission of the
Poet; as well as regarding that mysterious analogy between the outer
world of nature and the inner world of the heart, which it was so
peculiarly the tendency of her writings to develop.--_Memoir_, pp.
272-3.]
The dramatic poem of “Tasso,” though presenting no changeful pageants
of many-coloured life--no combination of stirring incidents, nor
conflict of tempestuous passions--is yet rich in interest for those who
find--
“The still, sad music of humanity,
... of ample power
To chasten and subdue.”
It is a picture of the struggle between elements which never can
assimilate--powers whose dominion is over spheres essentially adverse;
between the spirit of poetry and the spirit of the world. Why is it
that this collision is almost invariably fatal to the gentler and
the holier nature? Some master-minds have, indeed, winged their way
through the tumults of crowded life, like the sea-bird cleaving the
storm from which its pinions come forth unstained; but there needs a
celestial panoply, with which few indeed are gifted, to bear the heirs
of genius not only unwounded, but unsoiled, through the battle; and
too frequently the result of the poet’s lingering afar from his better
home has been mental degradation and untimely death. Let us not be
understood as requiring for his wellbeing an absolute seclusion from
the world and its interests. _His_ nature, if the abiding-place of the
true light be indeed within him, is endowed above all others with the
tenderest and most widely-embracing sympathies. Not alone from “the
things of the everlasting hills,” from the storms or the silence of
midnight skies, will he seek the grandeur and the beauty which have
their central residence in a far more majestic temple. Mountains, and
rivers, and mighty woods, the cathedrals of nature--these will have
their part in his pictures; but their colouring and shadows will not
be wholly the gift of rising or departed suns, nor of the night with
all her stars; it will be a varying suffusion from the life within,
from the glowing clouds of thought and feeling, which mantle with their
changeful drapery all external creation.
----“We receive but what we give,
And in _our_ life alone does nature live.”
Let the poet bear into the recesses of woods and shadowy hills a
heart full-fraught with the sympathies which will have been fostered
by intercourse with his kind--a memory covered with the secret
inscriptions which joy and sorrow fail not indelibly to write: then
will the voice of every stream respond to him in tones of gladness or
melancholy, accordant with those of his own soul, and he himself, by
the might of feelings intensely human, may breathe the living spirit of
the oracle into the resounding cavern or the whispering oak. We thus
admit it essential to his high office, that the chambers of imagery in
the heart of the poet must be filled with materials moulded from the
sorrows, the affections, the fiery trials, and immortal longings of the
human soul. Where love, and faith, and anguish, meet and contend--where
the tones of prayer are wrung from the suffering spirit--_there_ lie
his veins of treasure; there are the sweet waters ready to flow from
the stricken rock. But he will not seek them through the gaudy and
hurrying masque of artificial life; he will not be the fettered Samson
to make sport for the sons and daughters of fashion. Whilst he shuns no
brotherly communion with his kind, he will ever reserve to his nature
the power of _self_-communion--silent hours for
“The harvest of the quiet eye
That broods and sleeps on his own heart,”
and inviolate retreats in the depths of his being--fountains lone and
still, upon which only the eye of Heaven shines down in its hallowed
serenity. So have those who make us “heirs of truth and freedom by
immortal lays,” ever preserved the calm, intellectual ether in which
they live and move from the taint of worldly infection; and it appears
the object of Goethe, in the work before us, to make the gifted spirit
sadder and wiser by the contemplation of one, which, having sold its
birthright, and stooped from its “privacy of glorious light,” is forced
into perpetual contact with things essentially of the earth earthy.
Dante has spoken of what the Italian poets must have learned but too
feelingly under their protecting princes--the bitter taste of another’s
bread, the weary steps by which the stairs of another’s house are
ascended; but it is suffering of a more spiritual nature which is here
portrayed. Would that the courtly patronage, at the shrine of which
the Italian muse has so often waved her censer, had imposed no severer
tasks upon its votaries than the fashioning of the snow statue which
it required from the genius of Michael Angelo! The story of Tasso is
fraught with yet deeper meaning, though it is not from the period of
his most agonising trials that the materials of Goethe’s work are
drawn. The poet is here introduced to us as a youth at the court of
Ferrara; visionary, enthusiastic, keenly alive to the splendour of
the gorgeous world around him, throwing himself passionately upon the
current of every newly-excited feeling; a creature of sudden lights and
shadows, of restless strivings after ideal perfection, of exultations
and of agonies. Why is it that the being thus exhibited as endowed with
all these trembling capacities for joy and pain, with noble aspirations
and fervid eloquence, fails to excite a more reverential interest, a
more tender admiration? He is wanting in dignity, in the sustaining
consciousness of his own high mission; he has no city of refuge within
himself, and thus--
“Every little living nerve,