No more shall violets linger in the dell,
Or purple orchis variegate the plain,
Till spring again shall call forth every bell
And dress with humid hands her wreaths again.
Ah, poor humanity! so frail, so fair,
Are the fond visions of thy early day,
Till tyrant passion and corrosive care
Bid all thy fairy colours flee away!
Another May new buds and flowers shall bring;
Ah! why has happiness no second spring?
WHEN on some balmy breathing night of Spring,
The happy child, to whom the world is new,
Pursues the evening moth of mealy wing,
Or from the heath-bell beats the sparkling dew,
He sees, before his inexperienced eyes
The brilliant glow-worm, like a meteor shine
On the turf bank ;-amazed and pleased he cries,
"Star of the dewy grass, I make thee mine!
Then, ere he sleep, collects the moistened flower,
And bids soft leaves his glittering prize enfold,
And dreams that fairy lamps illume his bower-
Yet with the morning shudders to behold
His lucid treasure rayless as the dust ;
So turn the world's bright joys to cold and blank disgust.
Mrs. Smith's descriptive powers were of a high order, as may be seen from the following specimen, which reminds. one of Crabbe's style. The lines are taken from the posthumous volume entitled "Beachy Head, and other Poems."
AMONG deep woods is the dismantled site
Of an old abbey, where the chanted rite
By twice ten brethren of the monkish cowl
Was duly sung; and requiems for the soul
Of the first founder; for the lordly chief,
Who flourished paramount of many a fief,
Left here a stipend, yearly paid, that they
The pious monks for his repose might say
Mass and orisons to Saint Monica.
Beneath the falling archway, overgrown
With briars, a bench remains, a single stone
Where sat the indigent, to wait the dole
Given at the buttery, that the baron's soul
The poor might intercede for; there would rest,
Known by his hat of straw with cockles drest,
And staff and humble weed of watchet gray,
The wandering pilgrim, who came there to pray
The intercession of Saint Monica.
Stern Reformation and the lapse of years
Have reft the windows, and no more appears
Abbot or martyr on the glass annealed;
And half the falling cloisters are concealed
By ash and elder: the refectory wall
Oft in the storm of night is heard to fall,
When, wearied by the labours of the day,
The half-awakened cottars, starting, say,
66 It is the ruins of Saint Monica."
Now with approaching rain is heard the rill
Just trickling through a deep and hollow gill
By osiers and the alder's crowding bush,
Reeds, and dwarf elder, and the pithy rush,
Choked and impeded: to the lower ground
Slowly it creeps; there traces still are found
Of hollow squares, embanked with beaten clay,
Where brightly glitter in the eye of day
The peopled waters of Saint Monica.
The chapel pavement where the name and date,
Or monkish rhyme, had marked the graven plate,
With docks and nettles now is overgrown;
And brambles trail above the dead unknown.
Impatient of the heat, the straggling ewe
Tinkles her drowsy bell, as, nibbling slow,
She picks the grass among the thistles gray,
Whose feathered seed the light air bears away
Over the relics of Saint Monica.
Re-echoed by the walls, the owl obscene
Hoots to the night as through the ivy green,
Whose matted tods the arch and buttress bind,
Sobs in low gusts the melancholy wind:
The conium there, her stalks bedropped with red
Rears, with circea, neighbour of the dead;
Atropia, too, that as the beldams say,
Shows her black fruit to tempt and to betray,
Nods by the mouldering shrine of Monica.
Old tales and legends are not quite forgot.
Still superstition hovers on the spot,
And tells how here the wan and restless sprite,
By some way-wildered peasant seen at night,
Gibbers and shrieks, among the ruins drear;
And how the friar's lanthorn will appear
Gleaming among the woods, with fearful ray,
And from the churchyard take its wavering way,
To the dim arches of Saint Monica.
The antiquary comes not to explore,
As once, the unraftered roof and pathless floor;
For now, no more beneath the vaulted ground
Is crozier, cross, or sculptured chalice found,
No record telling of the wassail ale,
What time the welcome summons to regale,
Given by the matin peal on holyday,
The villagers rejoicing to obey,
Feasted in honour of Saint Monica.
Yet often still, at eve or early morn,
Among these ruins shagged with fern and thorn,
A pensive stranger from his lonely seat
Observes the rapid martin, threading fleet
The broken arch: or follows with his eye
The wall-creeper that hunts the burnished fly ;
Sees the newt basking in the sunny ray,
Or snail that sinuous winds its shining way
O'er the time-fretted walls of Monica.
He comes not here, from the sepulchral stone
To tear the oblivious pall that Time has thrown,
But, meditating, marks the power proceed
From the mapped lichen, to the plumèd weed,
From thready mosses to the veinèd flower,
The silent, slow, but ever-active power
Of vegetative life, that o'er decay
Weaves her green mantle, when returning May
Dresses the ruins of Saint Monica.
O Nature! ever lovely, ever new,
He who his earliest vows has paid to you
Still finds that life has something to bestow;
And while to dark forgetfulness they go,
Man, and the works of man, immortal Youth,
Unfading Beauty and eternal Truth,
Your Heaven-indited volume will display,
While Art's elaborate monuments decay,
Even as these shattered aisles, deserted Monica.
T may be questioned whether, in an average assemblage of professedly literary people, we should now-a-days find more than one person who had read forty pages of Miss Hannah More's works; yet that lady wrote more than thirty volumes. In her own days she was a power in the land. Garrick called her the Nine Muses; Johnson deferred to her; cynical Horace Walpole said she was not only one of the cleverest, but one of the best of human beings; the equally cynical Quarterly Review said: "How many have thanked God for the hour that first made them acquainted with her writings!" and she made over forty thousand pounds by her literary popularity. Who nowa-days reads Miss Edgeworth? Miss Mitford is halfforgotten; Mrs. Marcet is wholly so; Madame D'Arblay has achieved a precarious claim upon posterity's attention, not because she wrote "Cecilia," and received £2,000 for so doing, but because she has bequeathed to us a mass of piquant gossip about other people. Mrs. Montagu wrote and published charming letters, in the style of Lady Mary's; but probably most of those who read this page never heard of them. Miss Berry,
the Misses Lee, Miss Caroline Herschell, Mrs. Trimmer, Lady Smith, are all defunct as women of letters. Miss Jane Porter, Lady Morgan, Joanna Baillie, are talked of
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