A like spirit animates the lines called "Thoughts on the Soul"—the text being, that it exceeds man's thoughts to think how high God hath raised man—the "practical improvement," that man should cast off his slough, and send forth his spirit to expatiate in "immortal light, and life for evermore." We are earnestly reminded that, linked with the Immortal, immortality begins e'en here—the soul once given, as a solemn trust to man, there ne'er will come a date to its tremendous energies, but ever shall it be taking fresh life, starting fresh for future toil,
And on shall go, for ever, ever, on,
Changing, all down its course, each thing to one
With its immortal nature.
More popular, and charged with more than one home-thrust at the feelings, are the lines called "The Husband's and Wife's Grave." There, folded in deep stillness, in all the nearness of the narrow tomb, lie the partners in life and death—
Yet feel they not each other's presence now.
Dread fellowship!—together, yet alone.
"The Dying Raven " was Mr. Dana's earliest production in verse—appearing in 1825, in the New York Review, then under Bryant's editorship—and a fine memorial it is, tender and true, of a sympathetic nature, which has a reverent faith in the truth that He who made us, made also and loveth all. We watch the poor doomed bird, gasping its life out, where the grass makes a soft couch, and blooming boughs (needlessly kind) spread a tent above; we hear its mate calling to the white, piled clouds, and asking for the missed and forlorn one. That airy call
Thou'lt hear no longer; 'neath sun-lighted clouds,
With beating wings, or steady poise aslant,
Wilt sail no more. Around thy trembling claws
Droop thy wings' parting feathers. Spasms of death
Are on thee.
From Him who heareth the ravens' cry for food comes the inspiration of this elegy.
A "Fragment of an Epistle," composed in octosyllabic verse, is an attempt to escape not only what Byron calls the fatal facility, but what the author calls the fatal monotony, of that metre. There is little else to characterise it. "A Clump of Daisies" shows dim and diminutive beside the same object in other poets one might name. "Chantrey's Washington" has little of the massive power of either the statesman or the sculptor involved in its memorial verse. "The Moss supplicateth for the Poet," as for one who leaves, ofttimes, the flaunting flowers and open sky, to woo the moss by shady brook, with voice low and soft and sad as the brook itself, and because the moss is of lowly frame, and more constant than the flower, and because it is
Kind to old decay, and wraps it softly round in green.
On naked root, and trunk of grey, spreading a garniture and screen.
"The Pleasure Boat" goes tilting pleasantly on its way, to a soft breeze and musical murmur of accompaniment And such, with the "Spirit of the Pilgrims" and a few lyrics, comprise, so far as we are informed, the lays of the minstrel whom we have thus inadequately but impartially, "when found, made a note of."
