While I speak,
A sheeted spectre white and tall,
The cold mist climbs the castle wall,
And lays his hand upon thy cheek![1]
To the poet, walking in the solemn and silent woodlands,
Nature with folded hands seemed there,
Kneeling at her evening prayer.[2]
Flowers are said to be everywhere about us glowing,
—Some, like stars, to tell us Spring is born;
Others, their blue eyes with tears overflowing,
Stand like Ruth amid the golden corn.[3]
Here is one of the "effects" of the rising moon:
And silver white the river gleams,
As if Diana, in her dreams,
Had dropped her silver bow
Upon the meadows low.[4]
Harvests were gather'd in; and wild with the winds of September
Wrestled the trees of the forest, as Jacob of old with the Angel.[5]
Bent, like a labouring oar, that toils in the surf of the ocean,
Bent, but not broken, by age was the form of the notary public;
Shocks of yellow hair, like the silken floss of the maize, hung
Over his shoulders, &c.[6]
Silently, one by one, in the infinite meadows of heaven,
Blossom'd the lovely stars, the forget-me-nots of the angels.[7]
And as she gazed from the window she saw serenely the moon pass
Forth from the folds of a cloud, and one star follow her footsteps,
As out of Abraham's tent young Ishmael wandered with Hagar.[8]
Down sank the great red sun, and in golden glimmering vapours
Veil'd the light of his face, like the prophet descending from Sinai.[9]
Out of the prairie grass, the long white horns of the cattle "rise like the flakes of foam on the adverse currents of ocean." Stars are "the thoughts of God in the heavens." Bears are "the anchorite monks of the desert" Swinging from the great arms of a cedar-tree,
the trumpet-flower and the grape-vine
Hung their ladder of ropes aloft like the ladder of Jacob,
On whose pendulous steps the angels ascending, descending,
Were the swift humming-birds, that flitted from blossom to blossom.
Hot and red on his lips still burned the flush of the fever,
As if life, like the Hebrew, with blood had besprinkled its portals,
That the Angel of Death might see the sign, and pass over.[10]
This penchant for Scripture similitudes would have made the poet dear, two centuries ago, to the lovers of Donne and George Herbert, whatever we, now-a-days, may think of such concetti. But it is time to pass from particulars to generals. And first of the so-called American "Faust."
Drama the "Golden Legend" is not; dramatic poem, hardly. More fitly than Tennyson's longest work, it might be styled a "Medley." Whoso swears by the Unities, and abhors Teutonic romanticisms, and
