Letitia Elizabeth Landon (L. E. L.) in Fisher's Drawing Room Scrap Book, 1835/Introduction
2
INTRODUCTION.
1.
ND has my heart enough of song
To give these pictured lines
The poetry that must belong
To what such art designs?
The landscape, and the ruined tower,
The temple’s stately brow—
Methinks I never felt their power
As I am feeling now.
2.
For now I find in foreign scenes
What foreign scenes can be,
And truth with fancy intevenes,
To bring them home to me.
A few short miles, a few salt waves,
How strange a change there came—
Our lives as separate as our graves;
Is then our kind the same?
3.
Ah, yes; a thousand sympathies
Their general birth-place find,
And nature has a thousand links
To beautify and bind.
I deeply felt that song should make
One universal link,
Uniting, for each other’s sake,
All those who feel and think.
4.
The poet’s lovely faith creates
The beauty it believes;
The light which on his footstep waits
He from himself receives.
His lot may be a weary lot,
His thrall a heavy thrall,
And cares and griefs the crowd know not,
His heart may know them all.
5.
But still he hath a mighty dower—
The loveliness that throws
Over the common thought and hour
The colours of the rose.
A loveliness like that sweet ray
I marked this very morn,
When the first smile of early day
Amid the east was born.
6.
Fair Paris caught the crimson hue —
Well may I call it fair,
With its pure heaven of softest blue,
Its clear and sunny air—
Soft fell the morning o’er each dome
That rises mid the sky;
And, conscious of the day to come,
Demand their place on high.
7.
Round the Pantheon’s height was wrought
A web of royal red;
A glory as if morning brought
Its homage to the dead.
And Notre Dame’s old gothic towers
Were bathed in roseate bloom,
As Time himself had scattered flowers
Over that mighty tomb.
8.
For tomb it is—those arches hide
Six centuries below:
A world of faith, and pomp, and pride,
Our days no longer know.
The streets around wore those soft hues
That flit on rosy wings,
The meanest lane drank those pure dews
The angel morning brings.
9.
They lasted not—too soon they soil—
The common day began
With all the grief, the care, the toil,
That morning brings to man.
But still it was a lovely light
That vanished from the scene;
’Twas much, when past away from sight,
To think that it had been.
10.
All things are symbols, and we find,
In this glad morning prime,
The actual history of the mind
In its own early time.
So to the youthful poet’s gaze
A thousand colours rise;
The beautiful which soon decays,
The buoyant which soon dies.
11.
So does not die their influence.
His spirit owns the spell;
Memory to him is music—hence
The magic of his shell.
He sings of general hopes and fears,
A universal tone;
All weep with him, for in his tears
They recognise their own.
12.
True, that with weariness and wo
The fairy gift is won,
And many a glorious head lies low,
Ere half its race be run;
And many a one whose lute hangs now
High on the laurel tree,
Feels that the cypress’s dark bough
A fitter home would be—
13.
And turns away from many a smile.
And many a word of praise;
And with a lonely heart the while
Regrets the price he pays.
For fame is bought by feverish nights,
By sacrifice and pain;
The phantasie of past delights
Still haunts the poet’s strain.
14.
Though he may bid, with charmed voice,
His own wild heart be still,
And in lull’d silence sleep, his choice
It is not at his will.
His fate is song, and for that song
Doth glory track his way;
A thousand hearts to him belong,
Won by his gentle lay.
15.
’Tis his upon the landscape's bloom
A deeper spell to cast;
’Tis his, beside the ruined tomb,
To animate the past.
And let him think, if his own sphere
Too visionary seem,
Life’s dearest joy, and hope, and fear,
What are they each?—a dream.
Paris.L. E. L.