Letitia Elizabeth Landon (L. E. L.) in Fisher's Drawing Room Scrap Book, 1839/To Marguerite, Countess of Blessington
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Marguerite, Countess of Blessington
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TO MARGUERITE, COUNTESS OF BLESSINGTON.
I pray thee, ladye, turn these leaves,
And gaze upon the face
Whose lineaments no artist’s skill
Methinks, could truly trace.
The outline knows art’s fine control,
There are no colours for the soul.
And thou wert his familiar friend,*
Whose kindness and whose care
Bore with, and tenderly would soothe,
The mood it could not share.
Ah! all who feel that poet’s powers,
Should thank thee for his pleasant hours.
If I can read that face aright,
’Tis something more than fair:
Ah! not alone the lovely face,
The lovely heart is there.
The smile that seems to light and win,
Speaks of the deeper world within.
Amid Ravenna’s purple woods,
Purple with day’s decline,
When the sweet evening winds around
Were murmuring in the pine—
Did that dark spirit yield to thee
The trouble of its melody.
How gentle and how womanly
Thy soft mind must have reigned,
Before it could have won from him
The confidence it gained!
For chords like his, so finely strung,
With but a single touch are wrung.
Thy own quick feeling must have taught
The key-note to his own;
For only do we sympathize
With what ourselves have known.
The grief, the struggle, and the care,
We never knew until we share.
The proud—the sensitive—the shy—
And of such are combined
The troubled elements that make
The poet’s troubled mind.
He dreameth of a lovelier earth,
But must bide where he had birth.
Beneath that soft Italian sky,
How much must thou have heard
Of lofty hope—of low despair—
Of deep emotions stirred—
Thy woman’s heart became to thee
Memory and music’s master-key.
He must have looked on that sweet face,
And felt those eyes were kind;
No need to fear from one like thee
The mask, the mock, the blind.
Where he might trust himself he knew—
The instinct of the heart is true.
Thy page is open at my side—
Thy latest one, which tells,*
How in a world so seeming fair
What hate and falsehood dwells.
A dangerous Paradise is ours,
The serpent hides beneath its flowers.
Hatred, and toil, and bitterness,
And envyings, and wrath,
Mask’d, each one in some fair disguise,
Are round the human path.
May every evil thou hast shown
Be safely guarded from thine own!
* Lady Blessington’s "Conversations with Lord Byron."
* "The Victim’s of Society."