Page:Poems Blagden.djvu/20

 new dispensation of Christian grief and patience, she balances and completes the chords of Aspiration, Love, and Joy, which hang on the sunny side of Doubt, with those of Sorrow, Endurance, and Faith, which compose and weigh down the other. Through Sorrow, which gives out perfume, even as does trampled grass—through Endurance, which would blush to be weaker than the lone star, which looks forth singly on a dark world—she attains the goal of Faith; and with this soft, yet confident cadence, she closes the strain:

Apart from the literary merits of these sonnets—and they appear to me, more especially the sonnet "Endurance," to be not unworthy of Wordsworth—they are of special value to us as embodying her view of life, of the relations of God and man, of earth and heaven. They are the beautiful epitome of her Creed; and all she ever said, did, or wrote, buttress this central edifice of her soul. The same doctrine is inculcated in the remarkable poem on the interview which once took place between Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Georges Sand, and which wrung from the former two memorable sonnets. We find it again in "The Angels of Life;" and it is writ small, and with a pretty quaint conceit, in the lines on "My Monogram:"