him for a moment out of the mire. The whole train of circumstances which engender his emotions, prove the lover, in this case, to have been the silliest of mortal men, and his mistress, from the very beginning of his intercourse with her, to have been one of the most abandoned of her sex. “Lilian” is a burlesque on disappointed love, and a travestie of the passions which such a disappointment entails. We know not which are the more odious and revolting in their expression—the emotions of the jilted lover, or the incidents which call them into play.
The poem is designed to illustrate the bad effects produced on the female mind by the reading of French novels. We have nothing to say in their defence. But the incongruity lies here—that Lilian, who was seduced by means of these noxious publications, was evidently a lady of the frailest virtue from the very first; and her lover might have seen this with half an eye. Her materials were obviously of the most inflammable order; and it evidently did not require the application of such a spark as the seducer Winton, with his formidable artillery of imported literature, to set her tinder in a blaze—any other small contingency would have answered equally well. All that she wanted was an opportunity to fall; and that she would soon have found, under any circumstances whatsoever. The lover, however, sees nothing of all this, but relates the story of his unfortunate love-affair with as much simplicity as if he had been mourning the fall of the mother of mankind from paradise.
The lover relates his tale to his friend, the author. He begins by entreating him to
“Bear with me, in case
Tears come. I feel them coming by the smarting in my face.”
And then he proceeds to introduce us to this Lilian, the immaculate mistress of his soul—
“She could see me coming to her with the vision of the hawk;
Always hasten’d on to meet me, heavy passion in her walk;
Low tones to me grew lower, sweetening so her honey talk,
"That it fill’d up all my hearing, drown’d the voices of the birds,
The voices of the breezes, and the voices of the herds—
For to me the lowest ever were the loudest of her words.”
“Heavy passion in her walk!”—what a delicate and delectable young lady she must have been! Then, as to the fact so harmoniously expressed, of her accents drowning “the voices of the birds, the voices of the breezes, and the voices of the herds,” we may remark, that the first and second never require to be drowned at all, being nearly inaudible at any rate, even during the most indifferent conversation—so that there was nothing very remarkable in their being extinguished by the plaintiveness of the lady’s tones; while, with regard to the voices of the herds, if she succeeded in drowning these—the cattle being near at hand, and lowing lustily—she must indeed have roared to her lover “like any nightingale.”
The description of her is thus continued—
“On her face, then and for ever, was the seriousness within.
Her sweetest smiles (and sweeter did a lover never win)
Ere half-done grew so absent, that they made her fair cheek thin.
“On her face, then and for ever, thoughts unworded used to live;
So that when she whisper’d to me, ‘Better joy earth cannot give’—
Her lips, though shut, continued, ‘But earth’s joy is fugitive.’
“For there a nameless something, though suppress’d, still spread around;
The same was on her eyelids, if she look’d towards the ground;
When she spoke, you knew directly that the same was in the sound;”
By and by, a young gentleman, of the name of Winton, comes to visit Lilian and her father:—
“A formerly-loved companion—he was fresh from sprightly France,
And with many volumes laden, essay, poem, and romance.”
