Froudes Essays in Literature and History | Page 9

by the pillar, we saw her clear. 'Margaret! hist! come, quick, we are here!' 'Dear heart,' I said, 'we are long alone.' 'The sea grows stormy, the little ones moan.' 'But, ah, she gave me never a look, For her eyes were sealed to the holy book. Loud prays the priest, shut stands the door. Come away, children, call no more. Come away, come down, call no more.' Down, down, down, Down to the depths of the sea. She sits at her wheel in the humming town, Singing most joyfully. Hark what she sings: 'Oh, joy! oh, joy! For the humming street, and the child with its toy; For the priest, and the bell, and the holy well; For the wheel where I spun, And the blessed light of the sun.' And so she sings her fill, Singing most joyfully, Till the shuttle falls from her hand, And the whizzing wheel stands still. She steals to the window, and looks at the sand, And over the sand at the sea, And her eyes are set in a stare, And anon there breaks a sigh, And anon there drops a tear, From a sorrow-clouded eye, And a heart sorrow-laden, A long, long sigh, For the cold strange eyes of a little Mermaiden, And the gleam of her golden hair."
Not less excellent, in a style wholly different, was A.'s treatment (and there was this high element of promise in A. that, with a given story to work upon, he was always successful) of the AEgyptian legend of Mycerinus, a legend not known unfortunately to general English readers, who are therefore unable to appreciate the skill displayed in dealing with it. We must make room for one extract, however, in explanation of which it is only necessary to say that Mycerinus, having learnt from the oracle that being too just a king for the purposes of the gods, who desired to afflict the AEgyptians, he was to die after six more years, made the six years into twelve by lighting his gardens all night with torches, and revelled out what remained to him of life. We can give no idea of the general conception of the poem, but as a mere piece of description this is very beautiful.
"There by the river bank he wandered on, From palm grove on to palm grove, happy trees, Their smooth tops shining sunwards, and beneath Burying their unsunned stems in grass and flowers; Where in one dream the feverish time of youth Might fade in slumber, and the feet of joy Might wander all day long, and never tire: Here came the king, holding high feast at morn, Rose-crowned: and even when the sun went down, A hundred lamps beamed in the tranquil gloom, From tree to tree, all through the twinkling grove, Revealing all the tumult of the feast, Flushed guests, and golden goblets foamed with wine, While the deep burnished foliage overhead Splintered the silver arrows of the moon."
Containing as it did poems of merit so high as these, it may seem strange that this volume should not have received a more ready recognition; for there is no excellence which the writer of the passages which we have quoted could hereafter attain, the promise of which would not be at once perceived in them. But the public are apt to judge of books of poetry by the rule of mechanism, and try them not by their strongest parts but by their weakest; and in the present instance (to mention nothing else) the stress of weight in the title which was given to the collection was laid upon what was by no means adequate to bearing it. Whatever be the merits of the "Strayed Reveller" as poetry, it is certainly not a poem in the sense which English people generally attach to the word, looking as they do not only for imaginative composition but for verse;--and as certainly if the following passage had been printed merely as prose, in a book which professed to be nothing else, no one would have suspected that it was composed of an agglutination of lines.
"The gods are happy; they turn on all sides their shining eyes, and see below them earth and men. They see Tiresias sitting staff in hand on the warm grassy Asopus bank, his robe drawn over his old, sightless head, revolving inly the doom of Thebes. They see the Centaurs in the upper glens of Pelion, on the streams where the red-berried ashes fringe the clear brown shallow pools; with streaming flanks and heads reared proudly, snuffing the mountain wind. They see the Scythian on the wide steppe, unharnessing his wheeled house at noon; he tethers his beast down and makes his meal, mare's milk and bread baked on the embers; all around the boundless waving