ページの画像
PDF
ePub

XXII.

TO DR. DALTON.

THIS world so beautiful cannot produce
A thing more beauteous than a head of snow,
Or smoothly bald and bright with sunny glow,
That has been busied still in things of use.
The adventurous restlessness of Scottish Bruce
Led him to trace the backward course of Nile;
But I would rather trace that serious smile,
That seems habitual to a lip, not loose,
Nor yet constrain'd; a brow not wrinkled much,
An eye not dimm❜d but disciplined by age.

I could not know thee when thou wast the page
Of the young Lady Science, ere the touch
Unfelt of years had worn thy youth away;
I cannot trace thee to thy youthful day.

XXIII.

TO JOANNA BAILLIE.

LONG ere my pulse with nascent life had beat,
The ripe spring of thy early Paradise

With many a flower, and fruit, and hallow'd spice,

Was fair to fancy and to feeling sweet.

Time, that is aye reproach'd to be so fleet,
Because dear follies vanish in a trice,

Shall now be clean absolved by judgment nice,
Since his good speed made thee so soon complete.
But less I praise the bounty of old Time,
Lady revered, our Island's Tragic Queen,
For all achievements of thy hope and prime,
Than for the beauty of thine age serene,
That yet delights to weave the moral rhyme,
Nor fears what is, should dim what thou hast been.

XXIV.

ON READING THE MEMOIR OF MISS GRIZZLE BAILLIE.

GENIUS, what is 't? A motion of the brain.
And valour is the toughness of a nerve,

And the strong virtue that will never swerve
Is but the "lazy temperance" of a vein.
And what is pity but a twitching pain,
Seeking its own relief in pious acts?
Thus wisdom, seeking all things to explain,
Out of all good the soul of good detracts.
The simple woman that records the worth
Of the brave saints to whom she owed her birth,
Confutes a doctrine that she never knew.

For goodness, more than ever was perceived
By sense, or in the visible world achieved,
By might of mere believing, she makes true.

XXV

WHILE I survey the long, and deep, and wide
Expanse of time, the Past with things that were
Throng'd in dark multitude; the Future bare
As the void sky when not a star beside

The thin pale moon is seen; the race that died
While yet the families of earth were rare,
And human kind had but a little share

Of the world's heritage, before me glide

All dim and silent.

Now with sterner mien

Heroic shadows, names renown'd in song,

Rush by.

And, deck'd with garlands ever green,

In light and music sweep the bards along;
And many a fair, and many a well-known face,
Into the future dive, and blend with empty space.

XXVI.

Ан me! It is the saddest thing on earth
To see a change where much is yet unchanged,
To mark a face, not alter'd, but estranged
From its own wonted self, by its own hearth
So sadly smiling, like the ghost of mirth,
That cannot quite desert its long abode.
The very sigh that lifts the weary load
Of pain, and loosens the constraining girth
Within the breast, a semi-tone of laughter;
Though joy to woe, as light to shade is turn'd,
The trick of joy is not so soon unlearn'd:
The substance flits, the shadow lingers after.
The soul once rich in joy, though poor it be,
Will yet be bounteous in its poverty.

« 前へ次へ »