Page:The New Monthly Magazine - Volume 104.djvu/56

44 And burst o'er a city of stars; but she,

As he dash'd on the back of the Zodiac,

And quiver'd and glow'd down arc and node,

And split sparkling into infinity,

Thought that some angel, in his reveries

Thinking of earth, as he pensively

Lean'd over the star-crated balcony

In his palace among the Pleiades,

And grieved for the sorrow he saw in the land,

Had dropped a white lily from his loose hand. There is danger of indulging with too wide a poetical license in "conceits" of this sort, which verge upon the "high fantastical."

"The Artist" is, perhaps, the best example of our poet's meditative habit. It owes something to Emerson in its cast of thought, but it has a "native hue of resolution," and character and pith of its own. It teaches the inexhaustible teachings of Nature, animate and inanimate—haply hid in bramble blossoms, or shut within the daisy-lid; it shows how the Creator's glory lies within reach, so that the mosses we trample on, and "the pebbles on the wet sea-beach, have solemn meanings strange and sweet."We are bid seek more in the woodbine's breath, and the vine's woolly tendrils, than in Cato's suicide, or Cicero's words to Catiline—to recognise in the wild rose our next of blood, and our sisterhood in the kingcups. "Be strong," the would-be Artist is exhorted, "and trust high instincts more than all the creeds:" this is Emerson all over—And so is this:An excerpt or two, "most musical most melancholy," from "A Soul's Loss," will tell their own tale: