In that bright odorous honeysuckle wall
That once enclosed the happiest family
That ever lived beneath the blessed skies.
Where is that family now? O Isabel,
I feel my soul descending to the grave,
And all these loveliest rural images
Fade, like waves breaking on a dreary shore!
Isabel. Even now I see a stream of sunshine bathing
The bright moss-roses round our parlour window!
Oh, were we sitting in that room once more!
Magd. 'Twould seem inhuman to be happy there,
And both my parents dead. How could I walk
On what I used to call my father's walk,
He in his grave! or look upon that tree,
Each year so full of blossoms or of fruit,
Planted by my mother, and her holy name
Graven on its stem by mine own infant hands!
City of the Plague.
Would not the memory of this passage, and its local associations, bring, in after days, the tear into the eye of the sometime master of Elleray?
One more extract—this time in blank verse:
…. It was that hour
When Gloaming comes on hand in hand with Night,
Like dark twin-sisters, and the fairer Day
Is loath to disappear; when all three meet,
Gloaming, and Day, and Night, with dewdrops crown'd,
And veil'd, half-veil'd, each with her shadowy hair;
…. When all three meet
In the uncertain dimness of the sky,
Each with a beauty of her own combined
Into harmonious colouring, like a tune
Sung by three angel voices, up in heaven,
Unto the rapt ear of the listening earth.
…. In such an hour
Some pensive passage in our Book of Life,
Restored to its original characters,
Gleams on our eyes again, until we wish,
In love and pity for the yearned-for dead,
So passionate our desolate spirit's throes,
That we had ne'er been born, or even now
Were with th' invisible in weal or woe
To all eternity! An Evening in Furness Abbey.
The "Isle of Palms" is probably the most luxuriant and richly-coloured of Wilson's poems—the spilth of lavish fancy in its young May-moon. The "City of the Plague," had the poet introduced that objective power of which in prose he proved himself master, might have been wonderfully striking; but as it is, the objective interest is feeble, and those details suggested by the story, which might so easily have been made even too appalling, are, in reality, too much toned down to answer their end. Southey was shocked at Wilson's choice of such a subject at all: "Surely it is out-Germanising the Germans," he writes, in a letter to Mr. Wynn. "It is like bringing rack, wheels, and pincers upon the stage to excite pathos. No doubt but a very pathetic tragedy might be written upon 'the Chamber of the Amputation,' cutting for the stone, or
