Poems of Felicia Hemans in The Winter's Wreath, 1830/The Shadow of a Flower
The Shadow of a Flower.
BY MRS. HEMANS.
La voila telle que la mort nous l'a faite!
Bossuet.
"Never was a philosophical imagination more beautiful, than that exquisite one of Kircher, Digby and others, who discovered in the ashes of plants their primitive forms, which were again raised up by the power of heat. The ashes of roses say they, will again revive with roses, unsubstantial and unodoriferous; they are not roses which grow on rose-trees, but their delicate apparitions, and, like apparitions, they are seen but for a moment."
Curiosities of Literature.
'Twas a dream of olden days,
That art, by some strange power,
The visionary form could raise
From the ashes of a flower.
That a shadow of the Rose,
By its own meek beauty bow'd,
Might slowly, leaf by leaf, unclose
Like Pictures in a cloud.
Or the Hyacinth to grace
As a second rainbow, Spring;
Of Summer's path a dreary trace,
A fair, yet mournful thing!
For the glory of the bloom
That a flush around it shed,
And the Soul within, the rich perfume,
Where were they?—fled, all fled!
Nought but the dim faint line
To speak of vanished hours—
Memory! What are joys of thine?
Shadows of buried flowers.