The tranced Boy, now starting, stood,
And gently breathed his last address:
"O happy husband to possess
A wife so formed to love, to bless,
A wife so beautiful, so good!"
"O, BLESS thee, happy, happy, revelling brook!
Whose merry voice within this lonely nook,
In ceaseless gurgle, all day long
Singeth the dancing leaves among; —
I love,- O, how I love thy song!"
So from its joyous fount the almost bride,
Sweet Esther, poured her heart that brook beside.
The mystic word had passed its coral gate,
The little mystic Yes that sealed her fate:
'T is now upon the outward air;
Yet not, like other sounds, to share
The common death; for, haply, there
The formless element that near it flew
Caught the warm breath, and into being grew.
Her page-like spirit now, that little word
Ever before her, like some fairy bird,
Flits in her path; to all around,
To every form, to every sound,
Imparting love; till e'en the ground,
The dull, dark ground beneath, the trees above,
And chiming breezes, all, breathe only love.
And with that little word there ever comes
A tune like that the homeward wild-bee hums,
Shaping in sound her winter's store.
The future now seems brimming o'er
With nameless good; nor asks she more
Of jealous Time, than dimly thus to look
Into his bright, unlettered, future book.
One only form of all the crowded past
She could not, if she would, from memory cast,-
Nay, from her sight; for wheresoe'er
She turns or looks, afar or near,
That haunting form is ever there.
Her own sweet Poet, too, no other gives, -
E'en on his unread page that image lives;
And, sooth to say, she loves that page the
No, never had it touched her so before:
She loves the woods, the earth, the sky;
For all that in their empires lie
But teem of him, that dearer I,
On which she may not blush for aye to dwell,
That other self she cannot love too well.
ON THE STATUE OF AN ANGEL, BY BIENAIMÉ, IN THE POSSESSION OF J. S. COPLEY GREENE, ESQ.
Ан, who can look on that celestial face,
And kindred for it claim with aught on earth?
If ever here more lovely form had birth,
No, never that supernal purity, — that grace
So eloquent of unimpassioned love!
That, by a simple movement, thus imparts
Its own harmonious peace, the while our hearts
Rise, as by instinct, to the world above.
And yet we look on cold, unconscious stone.
But what is that which thus our spirits own
As Truth and Life? "T is not material Art,—
But e'en the Sculptor's soul to sense unsealed.
O, never may he doubt, its witness so revealed,-
There lives within him an immortal part!
ON THE LATE 8. T. COLERIDGE.
AND thou art gone, most loved, most honored friend!
No, never more thy gentle voice shall blend
With air of Earth its pure ideal tones,
Binding in one, as with harmonious zones,
The heart and intellect. And I no more
Shall with thee gaze on that unfathomed deep,
The Human Soul, -as when, pushed off the shore,
Thy mystic bark would through the darkness sweep,
Itself the while so bright! For oft we seemed
As on some starless sea, - all dark above,
All dark below,— yet, onward as we drove,
To plough up light that ever round us streamed.
But he who mourns is not as one bereft
Of all he loved: thy living Truths are left.
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