in the grass; and yet when the weight of the past presses heavily upon the present, when—
"memory makes the sky
Seem all too joyous for the shrinking eye."
In such a mood the voice of passionate complaining is both understood and welcome. There is a well of melancholy poetry in every human bosom. We have all mourned over the destroyed illusion and the betrayed hope. We have quarrelled in some embittered moment with an early friend, and when too late lamented the estrangement. We have all stood beside the grave, and asked of the long grass and ever-springing wild flowers why they should have life, while that of the beloved has long since gone down to the dust. How many have
"laid their youth as in a burial urn,
Where sunshine may not find it."
I remember to have read of an Hanoverian chorister, who, having lost by an early death the young village girl to whom he was betrothed, rudely carved upon her tomb a rose-bud broken on its stem, with the words beneath, "C'est ainsi qu'elle fût." This might be emblem and inscription for all the loveliest emotions of the soul. While such recollections remain garnered, poetry will always have its own appointed hour. Its haunted words will be to us even as our own. Solitude and sorrow reveal to us its secrets, even as they first revealed themselves to those
"Who learnt in suffering what they taught in song."
I believe that no poet ever made his readers feel unless he had himself felt. The many touching poems which most memories keep as favourites originated in some strong personal sensation. I do not mean to say that the fact is set down, but if any feeling is marked in the writing, that feeling has been keenly and painfully experienced. No indication of its existence would probably be shown in ordinary life : first, because the relief of expression has already been found in poetry, and secondly, from that extreme sensitiveness which shrinks from contact with the actual. Moreover, the habit has so grown up with us,—so grown with our growth, and strengthened with our strength, that we scarcely know the extraordinary system of dissimulation carried on in our present state of society.
In childhood, the impetus of conversation is curiosity. The child talks to ask questions. But one of its first lessons, as it advances, is that a question is an intrusion, and an answer a deceit. Ridicule parts social life like an invisible paling; and we are all of us afraid of the other. To this may be in great measure attributed the difference that exists between an author's writings and his conversation. The one is often sad and thoughtful, while the other is lively and careless. The fact is, that the real character is shown in the first instance, and the assumed in the second. Besides the impulses of an imaginative temperament are eager and easily excited, and gaiety has its impulses as well as despondency, but it is less shy of showing them. Only those in the habit of seclusion, occupied with their own thoughts, can know what a relief it is sometimes to spring, as it were, out of themselves. The fertile wit, the sunny vivacity, belong to a nature which must be what the French so happily term impressionable to be poetical. The writer of
