“Two summers pass’d away, and then—
Though yet young Merton’s eyes,
Wide with their language, spake of youth’s
Habitual surprise—
He felt that pleasures such as these
No longer could suffice.”
What the meaning of the three stanzas beginning with—
“It may have been in the ancient time,”
may be, we are utterly at a loss to conjecture. We seek in vain to invest them with a shadow of sense. Perhaps they are thrown in to redeem, by their profound unintelligibility, the shallow trifling of the rest of the poem. But it was not enough for young Merton that the girl accepted the fruits which he offered to her in a sullen tone. He had now reached the age so naturally and lucidly described as the period of life when the “eyes, wide with their language, speak of youth’s habitual surprise,” and he began to seek “new joys from books,” communicating the results of his studies to Maud, whose turn it now was to be surprised.
“So when to-morrow came, while Maud
Stood listening with surprise,
He told the tale learnt over night,
And, if he met her eyes,
Perhaps said how far the stars were, and
Talk’d on about the skies.”
The effect of these lucid revelations upon the mind of Maud was very overpowering.
“She wept for joy if the cushat sang
Its low song in the fir;
The cat, perhaps, broke the quiet with
Its regular slow purr;
’Twas music now, and her wheel gave forth
A rhythm in its whirr.
“She once had read, When lovers die,
And go where angels are,
Each pair of lover’s souls, perhaps,
Will make a double star;
So stars grew dearer, and she thought
They did not look so far.
“But being ignorant, and still
So young as to be prone
To think all very great delights
Peculiarly her own,
She guess’d not what to her made sweet
Books writ on lovers’ moan.”
And so the poem babbles on through several very sickly pages, in which the following descriptive stanza occurs:—
“The flat white river lapsed along,
Now a broad broken glare,
Now winding through the bosom’d lands,
Till lost in distance, where
The tall hills, sunning their chisell’d peaks,
Made emptier the empty air.”
During one of their ramblings, Maud becomes visibly embarrassed.
“But Merton’s thoughts were less confused:
‘What, I wrong ought so good?
Besides, the danger that is seen
Is easily withstood:’
Then loud, ‘The sun is very warm’—
And they walk’d into the wood.”
The wood consisting of a forest of as shady asterisks as the most fastidious lovers could desire.
“Months pass’d away, and every day
The lovers still were wont
To meet together, and their shame
At meeting had grown blunt;
For they were of an age when sin
Is only seen in front.”
The father, however, who was also of an age to see sin in front, suspects that his daughter is with child, and taxes her with it. Maud confesses her shame; upon which, as we are led to conjecture, old Gerald dies broken-hearted—while the girl is safely delivered under a cloud of asterisks. She is deterred from disclosing her situation to Merton, the father of the child—and why? for this very natural reason, forsooth, that
“He, if that were done,
Could hardly fail to know
The ruin he had caused, he might
Be brought to share her woe,
Making it doubly sharp.”
So, rather than occasion the slightest distress or inconvenience to her seducer, she magnanimously resolves to murder her baby; and accordingly the usual machinery of the poem is brought into play—the asterisks—which on former occasions answered the purpose of a forest and a cloud, being now converted into a very convenient pool, in which she quietly immerses the offspring of her illicit passion. And the deed being done, its appalling
