His "gold and crimson morning" has had its dawn—glowing with promise and performance: for the "soft blue day" we look with hope, but patience.
If the foregoing remarks on Mr. Smith's extraordinary gift for poetical imagery, appear too much taken up with his least successful ventures, we would qualify them by enforcing once again our sincere admiration of that gift in its higher developments. At almost every page we see, to use the language of Wordsworth,
at once
Some lovely image in the song rise up
Full-formed, like Venus rising from the sea.
The poet's delight in the exercise of this his native wealth, is freely avowed by him in the record—for we may assume it to be his—
But our chief joy
Was to draw images from everything;
And images lay thick upon our talk
As shells on ocean sands.
Let us cull one or two from the jewelled confusion in which they "lie thick" together. A word to womankind:
If ye are fair,
Mankind will crowd around you, thick as when
The full-faced moon sits silver on the sea,
The eager waves lift up their gleaming heads,
Each shouldering for her smile.
A vexed soul, tossed with tempests and not comforted, at last finds a lull of the tempest, and comfort in large measure, and so exclaims—
Now am I joyful like storm-battered dove
That finds a perch in the Hesperides.
Here is a Midsummer-day's picture—quite Turner-like in vivid colouring:
The lark is singing in the blinding sky,
Hedges are white with May. The bridegroom sea
Is toying with the shore, his wedded bride,
And, in the fulness of his marriage joy,
He decorates her tawny brow with shells,
Retires a space, to see how fair she looks,
Then proud, runs up to kiss her. All is fair—
All glad, from grass to sun!
With which Ovidian "theory of the tides" may be compared the following:
See yon poor star
That shudders o'er the mournful hill of pines!
'Twould almost make you weep, it seems so sad.
'Tis like an orphan trembling with the cold
Over his mother's grave among the pines.
Like a wild lover who has found his love
Worthless and foul, our friend, the sea, has left
His paramour the shore; naked she lies,
Ugly, and black, and bare. Hark, how he moans!
The pain is in his heart. Inconstant fool!
He will be up upon her breast to-morrow
As eager as to-day.
This is very striking, but too sensuous. The sensuous is not indeed a
