sleeping there in her loneliness—filled his heart with a profound, incommunicable sorrow. When the nights were very dreary and cold, when the autumnal rains fell and the winds, wailed mournfully over the graves, he lingered longest and came away most regretfully.
It was the image of this lady, long and tenderly and sorrowfully cherished, that suggested the stanzas “to Helen,” published among the poems written in his youth, which Russell Lowell says have in them a grace and symmetry of outline such as few poets ever attain, and which are valuable as displaying “what can only be expressed by the contradictory phrase of innate experience.”
As the lines do not appear in the latest editions of his poems we give them here.
“Helen, thy beauty is to me
Like those Nicean barks of yore,
That gently, o’er a perfumed sea,
The weary, wayworn wanderer bore
To his own native shore.
