"The Princess."

All along the valley while I walked to-day,
The two and thirty years were a mist that rolls away;
For all along the valley, down thy rocky bed,
Thy living voice to me was as the voice of the dead,
And all along the valley, by rock and cave and tree,
The voice of the dead was a living voice to me."

And the general effect of nature on the poetic temperament seems undoubtedly to be a sad one. Thus Tennyson writes:

"Tears, idle tears,

Rise in the heart and gather to the eyes,
In looking on the happy autumn fields,

And thinking of the days that are no more."

And Burns sings:

"Ye banks and braes o' bonnie Doon,

How can ye blume sae fair,

How can ye chant, ye little birds,

And I sae fu' o' care!

"Thou'll break my heart, thou bonnie bird,

That sings upon the bough;

Thou minds me o' the happy days

When my fause love was true.

"Thou'll break my heart, thou bonnie bird,

That sings beside thy mate;

For sae I sat, and sae I sang,

And wist na o' my fate."

And again in the poem "To a Mountain

Daisy":

"There in thy scanty mantle clad,

Thy snawie bosom sunward spread,
Thou lifts thy unassuming head

In humble guise;

But now the share uptears thy bed,
And low thou lies!

"E'en thou who mourn'st the Daisy's fate,
That fate is thine, no distant date;

Stern ruin's ploughshare drives elate
Full on thy bloom,

Till crushed beneath the furrow's weight
Shall be thy doom."

Similarly the old ballad tells how

"Thy braes were bonnie, Yarrow stream,
When first on them I met my lover,
Thy braes how dreary, Yarrow stream,
When now thy waves his body cover!
For ever now, O Yarrow stream,
Thou art to me a stream of sorrow,
For never on thy banks shall I

Behold my love, the flower of Yarrow."

And Rossetti writes, in his intense vision of human grief:

"Her seem'd she scarce had been a day

One of God's choristers;

The wonder was not yet quite gone

From that still look of hers;

Albeit to them she left, her day

"The Braes of Yarrow." J. Logan.

"The

Blessed

Damozel."

Had counted as ten years.

"Sunset Wings."

"To one, it is ten years of years.
But now, and in this place,

Surely she lean'd o'er me, her hair

Fell all about my face;

Nothing; the Autumn fall of leaves

The whole year sets apace.

"Ah, sweet, even now in that bird's song

Strove not her accents there

Fain to be hearken'd? When those bells
Possess'd the midday air,

Strove not her steps to reach my side

Down all the echoing stair?"

This is almost equalled in sadness by his

sonnet:

"To-night this sunset spreads two golden wings

Cleaving the western sky;

Wing'd, too, with wind it is, and winnowings
Of birds; as if the day's last hour in rings

Of strenuous flight must die.

"Even thus hope's hours, in ever eddying flight,

To many a refuge tend.

With the first light she laugh'd, and the last light
Glows round her still, who natheless in the night
At length must make an end.

"And now the mustering rooks innumerable

Together sail and soar,

While for the day's death, like a tolling knell,
Unto the heart they seem to cry, Farewell,
No more, farewell, no more!

"Is hope not plum'd, as 'twere a fiery dart?
And O! thou dying day,

Even as thou goest, must she, too, depart,

And sorrow fold such pinions on the heart
As will not fly away?"

Emerson in the following suggestive verses shows the power that scenery connected with his early years had of recalling the past:

"Knows he who tills this lonely field,

To reap its scanty corn,
What mystic fruit his acres yield

At midnight, and at morn?

"In the long Summer afternoon,

The plain was full of ghosts;

I wander'd up, I wander'd down,
Beset by pensive hosts.

"The winding Concord gleam❜d below,
Pouring as wide a flood

As when my brothers, long ago,
Came with me to the wood.

"But they are gone, the holy ones
Who trod with me this lovely vale;
The strong, star-bright companions
Are silent, low, and pale.

'I touch this flower of silken leaf,
Which once our childhood knew;

Its soft leaves wound me with a grief
Whose balsam never grew."

"Dirge." R. W. Emerson.

And in a similar manner Longfellow writes of the seashore:

"Palingene- "I lay upon the headland height and listen'd To the incessant sobbing of the sea

sis." H. W.

Longfellow.

In caverns under me,

And watch'd the waves that toss'd and fled and glisten'd,
Until the rolling meadows of amethyst

Melted away in mist.

"Then suddenly as one from sleep I started,
For round about me all the sunny capes
Seem'd peopled with the shapes

Of those whom I had known in days departed,
Apparell'd in the loveliness which gleams
On faces seen in dreams.

"A moment only and the light and glory
Faded away, and the disconsolate shore
Stood lonely as before;

And the wild roses of the promontory
Around me shudder'd in the wind, and shed
Their petals of pale red."

Matthew Arnold gives a more modern version of the ideas Coleridge expressed in the "Ode on Dejection," which has already been quoted in this chapter. The comparison of the two passages is a very interesting one. The form in which Coleridge gives expression