Chapter II: The Slaves' Feast (3)

No great thinker ever lived and taught you
All the wonder that his soul received;
No true painter ever set on canvas
All the glorious vision he conceived.

No musician ever held your spirit
Charmed and bound in his melodious chains,
But be sure he heard, and strove to render
Feeble echoes of celestial strains.

No real poet ever wove in numbers
All his dream, but the diviner part,
Hidden from all the world, spake to him only
In the voiceless silence of his heart.

So with love; for love and art united
Are twin mysteries; different, yet the same:
Poor, indeed, would be the love of any
Who could find its full and perfect name.

Love may strive, but vain is the endeavor
All its boundless riches to unfold;
Still its tenderest, truest secret lingers
Ever in its deepest depths untold.

Things of time have voices, speak and perish:
Art and love speak, but their words must be
Sighings of illimitable forests,
Waves of an unfathomable sea.

The positive merit of this--passing the odious business of comparison--is, to our mind, the well-managed amplification of the main thought, and the swell both of sense and sound at the close, which we find a beauty of high order. The last two lines especially seize the melodic principle of the metre, which, beyond almost any other we know, calls for long musical words. Only "voiceless silence" strikes one as tautological to the last degree. Miss Proctor very rarely makes outright mistakes, and she may have seen some subtle sense added by the word "voiceless" that we cannot. All the silences we have ever known were strictly voiceless, and decidedly apt to terminate about the time any voice began.

The next great topic with our poetess is the sweet uses of adversity. She is never weary of celebrating the beauty and benignity of sorrow. In fact, she appears to have a personal friendship for misfortune, as the great elevating and purifying dispensation of earthly existence. Grief, disappointment, death, are to her philosophy but natural incidents, to be expected and met without fear--processes tending to the higher result hereafter. But here is her whole thought, better set forth than we can say it:

Friend Sorrow.

Do not cheat thy heart and tell her
Grief will pass away,
Hope for fairer times in future
And forget to-day.
Tell her, if you will, that sorrow
Need not come in vain,
Tell her that the lesson taught her
Far outweighs the pain.

Cheat her not with the old comfort,
"Soon she will forget:"
Bitter truth, alas! but matter
Rather for regret.
Bid her not "Seek other pleasures,
Turn to other things:"
Rather nurse her caged sorrow
Till the captive sings.

Rather bid her go forth bravely
And the stranger greet,
Not as foes with spear and buckler,
But as dear friends meet;
Bid her with a strong clasp hold her
By her dusky wings,
Listening for the murmured blessing
Sorrow always brings.

This is only one of a large number of poems full of varied exposition of these same views. Some are so ingenious and happy that we can hardly resist quoting them, were it not that, if those were the only qualifications, we should have to cite the major part of her poems. In fact, this conception of sorrow as a hidden blessing is peculiarly strong in all she has written. And yet, while recognizing in tribulation an elevating grace that wins it a welcome from her heart, she fully feels the sadness, the weariness, the poverty and pain of earthly lives. A strong instance of this is the "Cradle Song of the Poor," with its singular, sad refrain:

"Sleep, my darling, thou art weary,
God is good, but life is dreary."

{558}

And the miseries of the poor have evoked the only bitter lines she ever wrote, which, coming, as they do, the very last in her book, seem almost like an after-addition--the strange strong lines called "Homeless." There is a force in some of the lines that reminds us of Hood:

It is cold, dark midnight, yet listen
To that patter of tiny feet!
Is it one of your dogs, fair lady,
Who whines in the bleak, cold street?
Is it one of your silken spaniels
Shut out in the snow and the sleet?

My dogs sleep warm in their baskets,
Safe from the darkness and snow;
All the beasts in our Christian England
Find pity wherever they go.
(Those are only the homeless children
Who are wandering to and fro.)

Look out in the gusty darkness:
I have seen it again and again,
That shadow, that flits so slowly
Up and down past the window-pane:
It is surely some criminal lurking
Out there in the frozen rain!

Nay, our criminals all are sheltered,
They are pitied and taught and fed:
That is only a sister-woman,
Who has got neither food nor bed:
_And the Night cries, "Sin to be living;"
And the River cries, "Sin to be dead."_

.....

There is one other piece perhaps even sadder than this when we penetrate its full, stern significance:

The Requital.

Loud roared the tempest, fast fell the sleet;
A little child-angel passed down the street
With trailing pinions and weary feet.

The moon was hidden; no stars were bright;
So she could not shelter in heaven that night,
_For the angels' ladders are rays of light._

She beat her wings at each window-pane,
And pleaded for shelter, but all in vain:
"Listen," they said, "to the pelting rain!"

She sobbed, as the laughter and mirth grew higher,
"Give me rest and shelter beside your fire,
And I will give you your heart's desire."

The dreamer sat watching his embers gleam,
While his heart was floating down hope's bright stream,
So he wove her wailing into his dream.

The worker toiled on, for his time was brief;
The mourner was nursing her own pale grief:
They heard not the promise that brought relief.

But fiercer the tempest rose than before,
When the angel paused at a humble door
And asked for shelter and help once more.

A weary woman, pale, worn, and thin,
With the brand upon her of want and sin,
Heard the child-angel and took her in.

Took her in gently, and did her best
To dry her pinions; and made her rest
With tender pity upon her breast.

When the eastern morning grew bright and red,
Up the first sunbeam the angel fled,
Having kissed the woman, and left her--dead.

Human waifs forgotten by all their kind are a sorrowful picture enough, but this of a human heart so desolate, so blank, so seared, so far from all hope or joy in life, that even God its Creator does not deny its supreme wish to die, is inexpressibly dreary. This is worthy to stand beside Tennyson's "Mariana in the Moated Grange."

One touch worth noticing is the fiction by which the angel is detained on earth; that "the angels' ladders are rays of light." It strikes us as one of the most ingenious we have ever met, and no less beautiful than happy. The whole structure of the narrative indeed, is admirable; it is difficult to see how the parts could be fitted more nicely. This skill Miss Procter has in an uncommon degree, and all her longer narrative poems exemplify it.

Of course, such thoughts on life as these last verses contain blend naturally with noble thoughts on death. Here, again, Miss Procter's prevailing thoughtfulness has developed her ideas into many beautiful applications. The lines called "The Angel of Death," which so touchingly close Charles Dickens's late sketch of her, the sweet, weary "Tryst with Death," and many others, are examples of this. But among them all there is none which more truly embodies her conceptions, or which, at the same time, is more deeply instinct with the hopefulness which underlies all her graver utterances, than the admirable lines:

Our Dead.

Nothing is our own; we hold our treasures
Just a little time ere they are fled:
One by one life robs us of our treasures:
Nothing is our own except our dead.

They are ours, and hold in faithful keeping,
Safe for ever, all they took away.
Cruel life can never stir that sleeping;
Cruel time can never seize that prey.

Justice pales, truth fades, stars fall from heaven:
Human are the great whom we revere;
No true crown of honor can be given,
Till we place it on a funeral bier.

How the children leave us, and no traces
Linger of that smiling angel hand;
Gone, for ever gone; and in their places
Weary men and anxious women stand.

{559}

_Yet, we have some little ones, still ours;
They have kept the baby smile, we know,
Which we kissed one day, and hid with flowers,
On their dead white faces, long ago._

When our joy is lost--and life will take it--
Then no memory of the past remains,
Save with some strange, cruel sting, to make it
Bitterness beyond all present pains.

_Death, more tender-hearted, leaves to sorrow
Still the radiant shadow, fond regret;_
We shall find, in some far bright to-morrow
Joy that he has taken, living yet.

"Is love ours, and do we dream we know it
Bound with all our heart-strings all our own?
Any cold and cruel dawn may show it
Shattered, desecrated, overthrown.

_Only the dead hearts forsake us never:
Death's last kiss has been the mystic sign
Consecrating love our own for ever,
Crowning it eternal and divine._

_So when Fate would fain besiege our city,
Dim our gold or make our flowers fall,
Death, the angel, comes in love and pity
And, to save our treasures, claims them all._

Her ideas regarding death are very lofty. They are equally removed from the timorous, painful harping on dissolution that characterizes the _underdone_ poetic organism, from the graphic grimness of Miss Rossetti's class of thinkers, who seem to take a ghastly delight in anatomizing the subject, and last from the passionate weak welcoming of the end--the coward courage which dares not live. In a word, Miss Procter was a Christian.

In quitting her poems of thought, it will perhaps be well to pretermit our long course of praise, and speak of the faults of her writing, most of which are strongest in these very poems. In verbal correctness, she is far above the average; for so voluminous a writer, singularly free from them. Still, by G. Washington-Moon-light, we can discover certain errors, principally of accent or collocation. Some few appear in the verses we have cited. In "Beyond," "baptism" is made a trisyllable; though, standing where it does, an appeal might well be taken to the higher equity of rhythm against the arbitrary technicality of the law of orthoepy. Also, we doubt if "perfécted" be the best pronunciation to-day. And in "Homeless," in the expression,

"Is it one of your dogs, fair lady,
Who whines in the bleak, cold street?"

it might with all respect for the intelligence of the race at large, and, above all, for the prodigious latent capabilities of all ladies' dogs--it might be seriously questioned whether the canine personality is so marked as to admit of the relative "who." We feel quite sure that the original idea was to reserve this particular pronoun for selfish mankind, and we fear that the slow science of grammar is still fettered, even as to the most marvellous of the dog kind, by the trammelling traditions of comparative anatomy.

But such flaws as these are venial, occurring as they do at rare intervals, in a very large number of verses, written young, and crowded into the compass of a few years. Many of them were mere passing contributions to the periodical press of the day, and, taken as a whole, compare to advantage with the hasty emanations of almost any author.

In metre Miss Procter achieves no high effects, and attempts none. With very fair taste in selection of metre, she is by no means an artist in rhythm, and appears to aim at little or nothing beyond passable metrical correctness. She is carelessly harsh and incidentally melodious. Once or twice she tries some sort of irregular or lyric measure, and it appears rather to impede than aid her accustomed clear flow of thought.

In style she has two prominent though not great faults. One is her refinement. She is so refined that it would, even had she reached the full promise of her life, have prevented her, in all probability, from ever being broadly popular. Her field is too high and narrow: she deals mainly with sentiments and sympathies which interest only those who have not only sorrowed, but reflected. But this blame is praise in itself. The other is more of a real fault. Miss Procter tempts us to believe that the diffuseness which we have attributed chiefly to their education has some foundation in woman's nature itself. {560} Different as she is from the ordinary type, her womanhood vindicates itself, though still in a way of her own. The effect on her style is not what we spoke of--dilution--but amplification. Sometimes she is led away by her fertility of illustration to illustrate too much. She holds up the idea in too many lights, more than are needful to understand her. There is a little of this even in "Incompleteness," before cited, but the illustrations are so happy that the effect is not perceived: it is seldom we are troubled with too many good things in a poem. Very often, however, this practice of ramifying thoughts into so many applications--one natural result of her thorough thinking--greatly injures the whole, and almost always, where there is much of this amplification, it passes beyond the strict limits of the strongest effect.

There are, furthermore, some few poems liable to cavil which seem to have been mere exercises or experiments, and call for other criticism than her finished performances. Others suffer from their author's inveterate habit of seizing on every-day subjects. Now and then she takes up one so trite that all the charm of her manner cannot mend it. The result is like a pebble set in filigree.

The only grave artistic fault we ever found in her poems occurs in the Legend of Provence, one of her best narrative pieces, founded on the exquisite Legend of the Virgin Mary's assuming the personality and filling the place of a nun who has proved false to her vows and fled her convent. Repentant at last, she returns, a worn-out beggar, to die where her religion died, meets her semblance, recognizes it as what she might have been, and implores Mary's aid.

And Mary answered: "From thy bitter past,
Welcome, my child! Oh! welcome home at last!
I filled thy place: thy flight is known to none,
For all thy daily duties I have done;
Gathered thy flowers and prayed, and sung, and slept;
Didst thou not know, poor child, thy place was kept?"

This strikes us as a tremendous blunder. For the nun to know that her place was kept would knock the bottom out of the entire legend. Who wouldn't sin with his pardon drawn up in advance, and entire secrecy and perfect restoration awaiting the first active twinge of repentance? We cannot imagine for an instant how Miss Procter could overlook this; unless we have made some equally egregious error in our understanding of the poem and its scope.

We find, or fancy we find, in her writings, a shade of resemblance to the taste and tact of her father, "Barry Cornwall." Perhaps it was because she feared her generic tendencies of style, that she has written few or no songs, and none at all like his sort. If her object was to avoid suspicious resemblance, she has succeeded. The likeness is utterly intangible, and there is not a trace anywhere of an imitation most natural to her relations with him, and which must have proved easy to talent like hers.

Another noteworthy fact about her is also alluded to by Mr. Dickens. It is the total absence of humor, and the sober and shaded style of what she has written. He takes occasion, while speaking of this prevailing seriousness in one so young, expressly to bar the inference that she was of the melancholy moonlit sort, and mentions her abundant wit, and keen sense of the ludicrous, and the joyous quality of her laugh. We do not think an observant reader would misconceive her, as her kind-hearted biographer apprehended. She lacks the distinctive element of morbidness. There is a soundness in her sadness, so to speak, that makes us feel it to be the shadow of a soul that knows the sunshine also. Mournful people of the true chronic mournfulness show it far more by taking dismal views of ordinary subjects than by dealing only in dismal things. But the fact itself suggests a curious question which our aphorists have not yet answered. How is it that some men naturally rollick in print, while others, not less humorous, write nothing but the gravest stuff? {561} What made Hood's pen merry on his death-bed, and took the wit so out of Sydney Smiths's sermons? These two classes are so marked that one would think there must be a principle of some sort dividing them. Yet no one has ever laid down this principle. We no more pretend to do this than the rest, but merely raise the question, leaving it to some future critic to disentangle us from a most Cartesian dubitation.

Thus far we have quoted mainly in illustration of Miss Procter's characteristics. It must not be inferred, however, that there are not in her books excellences not specially arising out of her peculiar ideas of life. On the contrary, there are a number of pieces of that provoking class of good things which we might just as well have written ourselves--only we didn't. Very few of our friends, though, would think of looking in an English author for the following strong, spirited protest, written in 1861, when it was proposed to "strengthen the hands" of the mission for the conversion of Irish Catholics:

An Appeal.

Spare her, O cruel England!
Thy sister lieth low:
Chained and oppressed she lieth;
Spare her that cruel blow.
We ask not for the freedom
Heaven has vouchsafed to thee,
Nor bid thee share with Ireland
The empire of the sea.
Her children ask no shelter--
Leave them the stormy sky;
They ask not for thy harvests,
For they know how to die;
Deny them, if it please thee,
A grave beneath the sod;
But we do cry, O England,
Leave them their faith in God!

Take, if thou wilt, the earnings
Of the poor peasant's toil;
Take all the scanty produce
That grows on Irish soil,
To pay the alien preachers
Whom Ireland will not hear--
To pay the scoffers at the creed
Which Irish hearts hold dear:
But leave them, cruel England,
The gift their God has given;
Leave them their ancient worship,
Leave them their faith in heaven.

You come and offer learning--
A mighty gift, 'tis true,
Perchance the greatest blessing,
That now is known to you;
But not to see the wonders
Sages of old beheld
Can they peril a priceless treasure,
The faith their fathers held.

For in learning and in science
They may forget to pray:
_God will not ask for knowledge
On the great judgment day._

When, in their wretched cabins,
Racked by the fever pain.
And the weak cries of their children
Who ask for food in vain;
When, starving, naked, helpless,
From the shed that keeps them warm
Man has driven them forth to perish
In a less cruel storm;
Then, then we plead for mercy;
Then, sister, hear our cry;
For all we ask, O England,
Is--leave them there to die!
Cursed is the food and raiment
For which a soul is sold;
Tempt not another Judas
To barter God for gold.
You offer food and shelter
If they their faith deny;
What do you gain, O England!
By such a shallow lie?
We will not judge the tempted--
May God blot out their shame--
He sees the misery round them,
He knows man's feeble frame.
His pity still may save them.
In his strength they must trust
Who calls us all his children.
Yet knows we are but dust.

Then leave them the kind tending,
Which helped their childish years;
Leave them the gracious comfort
Which dries their mourner's tears;
Leave them to that great mother
In whose bosom they were born,
Leave them the holy mysteries
That comfort the forlorn;
And, amid all their trials,
Let the great gift abide,
Which you, O prosperous England!
Have dared to cast aside.
Leave them the pitying angels,
And Mary's gentle aid,
For which earth's dearest treasures
Were not too dearly paid.
Take back your bribes, then, England,
Your gold is black and dim;
_And if God sends plague and famine,
They can die and go to him._

This is by far the most unpolished and unequal thing Miss Procter has ever written, and full of faults of detail. But, spite of loose texture and repetition, and weak lines, and identical rhymes, there is a strength in all the essential features, and a spirit everywhere, that contrast strongly with the patriotic effusions that we have had so much of these last few years.

Another poem which has incidentally attracted no little notice is Homeward Bound, which anticipates the whole plot of Enoch Arden so completely that some shallow people felt called upon to say a number of very foolish things about the coincidence when Enoch Arden came out. {562} The chief differences are that the ship-wrecked hero is thrown on a desert island in the one and captured by Moors in the other. Enoch Arden also turns away from the agonizing picture of his forfeited home in silence, while Miss Procter's mariner reveals himself, kisses his wife once more _as if_ she were his, and departs, leaving the very awkward bigamy question wide open behind him, and in general evincing a noble ignorance of the law of England. He also perpetrates the dramatic error of surviving in a state of marine vagrancy for a quarter of a century. But, though inferior to Tennyson's, this poem has many excellent touches of pathos and nature, and must claim, equally with Enoch Arden, the full merit of its simple yet most telling conception.

_Apropos_ of resemblances, we are tempted to quote another of her best known poems, both for its real beauty and because it subtly reminds us of Longfellow, and we should be thankful if some one would only tell us why:

The Storm.

The tempest rages wild and high;
The waves lift up their voice and cry
Fierce answers to the angry sky.
_Miserere Domine_

Through the black night and driving rain,
A ship is struggling, all in vain,
To live upon the stormy main.
_Miserere Domine_

The thunders roar, the lightnings glare,
Vain is it now to strive or dare;
A cry goes up of great despair.
_Miserere Domine_

The stormy voices of the main,
The moaning wind and pelting rain
Beat on the nursery window-pane,
_Miserere Domine_

Warm curtained was the little bed,
Soft pillowed was the little head:
"The storm will wake the child," they said.
_Miserere Domine_

Cowering among his pillows white,
He prays, his blue eyes dim with fright,
"Father, save those at sea to-night!"
_Miserere Domine_

The morning shone all clear and gay
On a ship at anchor in the bay,
And on a little child at play.
_Gloria tibi Domine!_

Out of many which commend themselves, we select only one more, a little gem which we were surprised and pleased to find copied the other day in a little New York evening paper. We think it very suggestive and sweet.

A Lost Chord

Seated one day at the organ,
I was weary and ill at ease,
And my fingers wandered idly
Over the noisy keys.

I do not know what I was playing,
Or what I was dreaming then,
But I struck one chord of music
Like the sound of a great Amen.

It flooded the crimson twilight
Like the close of an angel's psalm,
And it lay on my fevered spirit
With a touch of infinite calm.

It quieted pain and sorrow,
Like love overcoming strife;
It seemed the harmonious echo
From our discordant life.

It linked all perplexed meanings
Into one perfect peace,
And trembled away into silence
As if it were loth to cease.

I have sought, but I seek it vainly,
That one lost chord divine,
That came from the soul of the organ,
And entered into mine.

It may be that Death's bright angel
Will speak in that chord again,
It may be that only in heaven
I shall hear that grand Amen.

We have yet to speak of one great element in these poems, their religion. With those who are born and bred in a church, their belief sits on them like their clothes--becomes a part of themselves. With converts it is oftener like a badge which they are proud to wear, and which some are fond of displaying. Miss Procter's was one of those rare natures in which religion seems to stain back, as it were, and color the very fountain-heads of all thought and impulse, as they are colored by the associations of childhood. In her, it was not like regalia for the processions of life or a reserve fund for emergencies, but thoroughly assimilated and vitalized; a _living_ faith; an actual, practical element in her daily doings, as present in her consciousness as her own individuality. Nor had she any of the combativeness of converts, whose zeal is apt sometimes to be aggressively meek and intolerantly lowly. Hers was a faith full of the charity that judges not. {563} Like all real feeling, it never obtrudes itself, and never shrinks from appearing in its proper place. Thus she has very few devotional and no sectarian pieces at all in her Legends and Lyrics, but once professedly entering on that line of thought, in her Chaplet of Verses, she is both Christian and Catholic throughout.

Yet among the few devotional pieces in the earlier series we find one of the best:

The Peace of God.

We ask for peace, O Lord!
Thy children ask thy peace;
Not what the world calls rest,
That toil and care should cease;
That through bright sunny hours
Calm life should fleet away,
And tranquil night should fade
In smiling day:
It is not for such peace that we would pray.

We ask for peace, Lord!
Yet not to stand secure,
Girt round with iron pride,
Contented to endure;
Crushing the gentle strings
That human hearts should know,
Untouched by others' joy
Or others' woe:
Thou, dear Lord! wilt never teach us so.

We ask thy peace, Lord!
Through storm, and fear, and strife,
To light and guide us on
Through a long, struggling life:
While no success or gain
Shall cheer the desperate fight,
Or nerve what the world calls
Our wasted might;
Yet pressing through the darkness to the light.

It is thine own, Lord!
Who toil while others sleep;
Who sow with loving care
What other hands shall reap:
They lean on thee entranced
In calm and perfect rest:
Give us that peace, Lord!
Divine and blest,
Thou keepest for those hearts who love thee best.

Very like this in sentiment are several of her best pieces, "Per Pacem ad Lucem," "Ministering Angels," and "Thankfulness." There are a number also addressed to the Virgin Mary, the best of which are too long for insertion. It is this which will restrict our quotations to one more piece, which breathes that lofty ardor that every struggling Christian has felt in his brighter hours of exaltation, and sighed to know that common moods cannot rise to it.

Our Titles.

Are we not Nobles? we who trace
Our pedigree so high
That God for us and for our race
Created earth and sky,
And light and air and time and space,
To serve us and then die?

Are we not Princes? we who stand
As heirs beside the throne,
We who can call the promised land
Our heritage, our own;
And answer to no less command
Than God's, and his alone?

Are we not Kings? both night and day,
From early until late,
About our bed, about our way,
A guard of angels wait;
And so we watch and work and pray
In more than royal state.

......

Are we not more? our life shall be
Immortal and divine.
The nature Mary gave to thee,
Dear Jesus, still is thine:
Adoring in thy heart I see
Such blood as beats in mine.

O God! that we can dare to fail
And dare to say we must!
O God! that we can ever trail
Such banners in the dust,
Can let such starry honors pale
And such a blazon rust!

Shall we upon such titles bring
The taint of sin and shame?
Shall we, the children of the King,
Who hold so grand a claim,
Tarnish by any meaner thing
The glory of our name?

But, although just to-day, in the present undeveloped state of woman's intellect, Miss Procter may strike us most by her advance in thought beyond her sex, she has a far higher claim on us for the admiration due to true womanhood. Where do these poets school their souls, that they come forth full of the experience of threescore years and ten? We know that Miss Procter died in the prime and summer of her days, with most of the great epochs and experiences of a woman's life yet before her. It is not even said that she ever loved; for the sake of him who should lose her, we hope it may be so. Yet her poems hold more tenderness and truth, more of real love, its anxiety, faith, fulfilment, more of woman's inner life, than any ten of the sweet soft natures who have taken these things to be their sole province; who fancy their inkstands are in their souls, and devote a lifetime of harmless harpings to rhyming some flutterings of heart and more flutterings of nerves. {564} Here, as everywhere, we meet with Miss Procter's unfailing force and clearness, and tremble at first to meet it. For of all agonizing things (as many a sensitive nature can testify) there is none like the unconscious cruelty of pure intellect when it comes to deal with the strange intuitions, the noble unreason, the holy follies of the heart. But hand in hand with her inborn analysis comes such a womanhood, so deep, so delicate, so full of sympathy and sweet counsel, as passes words. This union it is, as we said before, that stamps Miss Procter a poet. We men cannot half appreciate this; the sisterhood of sex that her poems must establish with women who have loved and suffered is for some woman only to set forth.

It is difficult to choose any one poem which stands pre-eminent in these qualities. One which will show her insight into the seemingly contradictory impulses of a woman's breast is

A Woman's Question.

Before I trust my fate to thee,
Or place my hand in thine;
Before I let thy future give
Color and form to mine,
Before I peril all for thee.
Question thy soul to-night for me.

I break all slighter bonds, nor feel
A shadow of regret:
Is there one link within the past
That holds thy spirit yet?
Or is thy faith as clear and free
As that which I can pledge to thee?

Does there within thy dimmest dreams
A possible future shine,
Wherein thy life could henceforth breathe
Untouched, unshared by mine?
If so, at any pain or cost,
Oh! tell me before all is lost.

Look deeper still. If thou canst feel
Within thy inmost soul
That thou hast kept a portion back,
While I have staked the whole,
Let no false pity spare the blow,
But in true mercy tell me so.

Is there within thy heart a need
That mine cannot fulfil?
One chord that any other hand
Could better wake or still?
Speak now--lest at some future day
My whole life wither and decay.

Lives there within thy nature hid
The demon-spirit Change,
Shedding a passing glory still
On all things new and strange?
It may not be thy fault alone--
But shield my heart against thy own.

Couldst thou withdraw thy hand one day,
And answer to my claim
That fate, and that to day's mistake--
Not thou had been to blame?
Some soothe their conscience thus; but thou
Wilt surely warn and save me now.

Nay, answer _not_--I dare not hear,
The words would come too late;
Yet I would spare thee all remorse,
So comfort thee, my fate--
Whatever on my heart may fall,
Remember, I _would_ risk it all.

The strength of this is in the rendering of that eloquent instinct of love which intuitively strikes the most responsive chord. Here it hits on the strongest appeal a woman can make to a man--to save her against himself. And no one can deny the boldness and beauty of the closing turn of thought.

The following poem bears a strong resemblance to the last in tone and train of analysis, with an element of calm fruition instead of the utter devotion. The one is love's June of trust; the other its September of fulfilment.

A Retrospect.

From this fair point of present bliss,
Where we together stand,
Let me look back once more, and trace
That long and desert land
Wherein till now was cast my lot,
And I could live, and thou wert not.

......

What had I then? A hope that grew
Each hour more bright and dear,
The flush upon the eastern skies
That showed the sun was near.
Now night has faded far away,
My sun has risen, and it is day.

A dim ideal of tender grace
In my soul reigned supreme;
Too noble and too sweet, I thought,
To live save in a dream;
Within thy heart to-day it lies,
And looks on me from thy dear eyes.

Some gentle spirit--love, I thought--
Built many a shrine of pain;
Though each false idol fell to dust,
The worship was not vain,
But a faint radiant shadow, cast
Back from our love upon the past.

And grief, too, held her vigil there;
With unrelenting sway,
Breaking my cloudy visions down,
Throwing my flowers away:
I owe to her fond care alone
That I may now be all thine own.

Fair joy was there: her fluttering wings
At time she strove to raise;
Watching through long and patient nights,
Listening long eager days:
I know now that her heart and mine
Were waiting, love, to welcome thine.

Thus I can read thy name throughout,
And, now her task is done,
Can see that even that faded past
Was thine, beloved one.
And so rejoice my life may be
All consecrated, dear, to thee.

{565}

There could scarcely be a truer sign of poetic power than the fidelity and finish of some of these heart-pictures. Out of many others we select two for contrast: one tracing the deep, dreary introspection of passive suffering; the other following out the subtle, restless impulses of pain with pangs. The first we take from a longer poem, "Philip and Mildred."

Dawn of day saw Philip speeding on his road to the great city,
Thinking how the stars gazed downward just with Mildred's patient eyes.
Dreams of work and fame and honor struggling with a tender pity,
Till the loving past receding saw the conquering future rise.

Daybreak still found Mildred watching, with the wonder of first sorrow,
How the outward world unaltered shone the same this very day,
How unpitying and relentless human life met this new morrow--
Earth, and sky, and man unheeding that her joy had passed away.

Then the round of weary duties, cold and formal, came to meet her,
With the life within departed that had given them each a soul;
And her sick heart even slighted gentle words that came to greet her;
For grief spread its shadowy pinions, like a blight, upon the whole.

_Jar one chord, the harp is silent; move one stone, the arch is shattered;
One small clarion-cry of sorrow bids an armed host awake.
One dark cloud can hide the sunlight; loose one string, the pearls are scattered;
Think one thought, a soul may perish; say one word, a heart may break._

Life went on, the two lives running side by side, the outward seeming,
And the truer and diviner hidden in the heart and brain:
Dreams grow holy put in action, work grows fair through starry dreaming:
But where each flows on unmingling, both are fruitless and in vain.

We hardly know which to like the better, the description itself or the moralizing. Very different, very far from moralizing, and yet even more to the life, is

A Comforter.

"Will she come to me, little Effie,
Will she come to my arms to rest,
And nestle her head on my shoulder,
While the sun goes down in the west?

"I and Effie will sit together
All alone in this great arm-chair:
Is it silly to mind it, darling,
When life is so hard to bear?

"No one comforts me like my Effie.
Just, I think, that she does not try,
Only looks with a wistful wonder
Why grown people should ever cry;

"While the little soft arms close tighter
Round my neck in their clinging hold:
Well, I must not cry on your hair, dear,
For my tears might tarnish the gold.

"I am tired of trying to read, dear;
It is worse to talk and seem gay;
There are some kinds of sorrow, Effie,
It is useless to thrust away.

"Ah! advice may be wise, my darling,
But one always knows it before;
And the reasoning down one's sorrow
Seems to make one suffer the more.

"But my Effie won't reason, will she?
Or endeavor to understand;
Only holds up her mouth to kiss me,
As she strokes my face with her hand.

"If you break your plaything yourself, dear,
Don't you cry for it all the same?
I don't think it is such a comfort,
One has only one's self to blame.

"People say things cannot be helped, dear,
But then that is the reason why;
For, if things could be helped or altered
One would never sit down to cry.

"They say, too, that tears are quite useless
To undo, amend, or restore:
When I think _how_ useless, my Effie,
Then my tears only fall the more.

"All to-day I struggled against it,
But that does not make sorrow cease;
And now, dear, it such a comfort
To be able to cry in peace.

"Though wise people would call that folly,
And remonstrate with grave surprise,
We won't mind what they say, my Effie;
We never professed to be wise.

"But my comforter knows a lesson
Wiser, truer than all the rest,
That to help and to heal a sorrow,
Love and silence are always best.

"Well, who is my comforter tell me!
Effie smiles, but she will not speak,
Or look up through the long, curled lashes
That are shading her rosy cheek.

"Is she thinking of talking fishes,
The blue-bird, or magical tree?
Perhaps I am thinking, my darling,
Of something that never can be.

"You long, don't you, dear, for the genii,
Who were slaves of lamps and of rings?
And I--I am sometimes afraid, dear,
I want as impossible things.

"But, hark! there is nurse calling Effie!
It is bedtime, so run away;
And I must go back, or the others
Will be wondering why I stay.

"So good-night to my darling Effie;
Keep happy, sweetheart, and grow wise:
There's one kiss for her golden tresses
And two for her sleepy eyes."

We do not know where to look for anything like this. It is so graphic, so simple, so true. We, at least, never _realized_ a scene so vividly, so minutely, with all the details we would notice if it actually happened, and not a touch beyond, unless perhaps after reading Maud Müller. {566} The kind of force is in many respects the same, except that the woman-poet, as usual, says what the man-poet suggests of the inner life underlying. But it is excellently said, so well that one mentally declines to apply the principles of aesthetics, which would dictate Whittier's method as the more thoroughly artistic. How well the whole logic, or illogic, of that grand solace, a good cry, is given, and how natural and how sweet if one could only chance on an Effie that would not tell nurse all about it, to have a little "comforter" that would only know the grief and never care for the causes!

We have only one more poem to quote--one which we consider in many respects Miss Procter's best. If feeling, delicacy, pathos, truth, make beauty and poetry, this alone ought to entitle its author to distinction. Bare of all factitious ornament, carrying no overload of elegances, it goes straight to the heart of every mother, and strikes the deepest key-note in the organism of the world--motherhood. And it seems to us that, if all men today were to league against her memory, this poem should win her an immortality in the hearts of womankind:

Links With Heaven.

Our God in heaven, from that holy place
To each of us an angel guide has given;
But mothers of dead children have more grace,
For they give angels to their God and heaven.

How can a mother's heart feel cold or weary,
Knowing her dearer self safe, happy, warm?
How can she feel her road too dark or dreary,
Who knows her treasure sheltered from the storm?

How can she sin? Our hearts may be unheeding,
Our God forgot, our holy saints defied;
But can a mother hear her dead child pleading,
And thrust those little angel hands aside?

Those little hands stretched down to draw her ever
Nearer to God by mother love: we all
Are blind and weak, yet surely she can never,
With such a stake in heaven, fail or fall.

She knows that, when the mighty angels raise
Chorus in heaven, one little silver tone
Is hers forever; that one little praise,
One little happy voice, is all her own.

We may not see her sacred crown of honor,
But all the angels flitting to and fro
Pause smiling as they pass--they look upon her
As mother of an angel whom they know;

One whom they left nestled at Mary's feet--
The children's place in heaven--who softly sings
A little chant to please them, slow and sweet,
Or, smiling, strokes their little folded wings;

Or gives them her white lilies or her beads
To play with: yet, in spite of flower or song,
They often lift a wistful look that pleads
And asks them why their mother stays so long.

Then our dear Queen makes answer she will call
Her very soon: meanwhile they are beguiled
To wait and listen while she tells them all
A story of her Jesus as a child.

Ah! saints in heaven may pray with earnest will
And pity for their weak and erring brothers;
Yet there is prayer in heaven more tender still,
The little children pleading for their mothers.

In conclusion, we think the world will not know for a while yet how much it has lost in Adelaide Anne Procter. Her time to be missed will come when Catholic England will need to be represented in the national literature. For those who will force it into recognition, there will of necessity be strong rather than fine intellects. Then the world will turn back to her pages, and wish she were but there to represent Catholicity in England; then she will be carefully read, and, once this happens, her place is assured. And yet, even then, we can never know her as she was; for beyond almost any author we recall, Miss Procter impresses us as being far superior to her works. She is the best of examples of her own doctrine of imperfect expression. The fulness and fineness of her nature strike one from the beginning as being immeasurable by what she has written. There is something exalted and tender, rich and yet reserved, about the life which animates her poems, that interests us uncommonly. And when we come to read of her, what was her life and what its aims, and, above all, when we see how she is mourned by those who held her dear here, we recognize her for one of those rare and beautiful hearts whom God loves too well to leave us long, and conclude, in laying down these broken reflections of her spirit, that her noblest poem was herself.

------

{567}

The Indissolubility of Christian Marriage.

Number One.

The frightful corruption in the legislation and practice respecting divorce which has spread so widely during the past few years in our country has at last aroused the attention of those who are interested in the preservation of the public morals. They are beginning to write on the subject, and are casting about for the means of protecting the endangered institution of marriage. We feel it to be our duty to exercise what little influence we may possess in the community at large, in the same direction. At present, we shall restrict our remarks to one single point, which is the theological question of the lawfulness of divorce _a vinculo matrimonii_, for the cause of adultery, under the law of Christ. In order to make our intent and meaning plain, we shall begin by stating the proposition we wish to maintain. The marriage of Christians, validly ratified and consummated, is absolutely indissoluble; and therefore there can be no legal and valid divorce of the parties to such a marriage _a vinculo matrimonii_. The best and ablest Protestant writers admit this with one exception, that is, of the innocent party in the case of a marriage which has been violated by adultery. We leave them, therefore, to defend the indissolubility of marriage in all other cases, and confine ourselves to the one case in which they permit divorce.

The sole argument for the lawfulness of divorce in this instance is derived from the following texts in St. Matthew's gospel. "Whosoever shall put away his wife, _excepting for the cause of fornication_, causeth her to commit adultery." (v. 32.) "Whosoever shall put away his wife, _except it be for fornication_, and shall marry another, committeth adultery." (xix. 9.) The Catholic interpretation of these passages is, that our Lord permits a final separation _a mensâ et thoro_, for one cause, and one only, which is the grievous crime mentioned in these texts. In accordance with this interpretation, we explain these passages by the following paraphrase: "Whoever, for any lesser cause than the crime of adultery, separates himself finally from his wife, places both her and himself in the danger of sinning, and is guilty of creating a proximate occasion of adultery. If he separates himself from her on account of the grievous crime above mentioned, he is not responsible for her future crimes, nor is he guilty of placing himself without just cause in a condition in which the observance of his marriage vows becomes more difficult. Nevertheless, if he marries another, he commits adultery."

In order to sustain the truth of this interpretation, it is necessary to defend three propositions. First. That our Lord declared the bond of marriage indissoluble. Second. That he condemned all _soi-disant_ marriages of persons who were divorced, as adulterous. Third. That he permitted a final divorce _a mensâ et thoro_ simply, for the cause of adultery, and for no other.

The first proposition is established by all the texts of the New Testament which speak on the subject. We will first examine the text of St. Matthew, which includes the passage that is in dispute:

"And the Pharisees came to him, tempting him, and saying: Is it lawful
for a man to put away his wife for every cause? And he answered and said
to them: Have ye not read, that he who made man in the beginning, made
them male and female?
{568}
And he said: For this cause shall a man leave father and mother, and
shall cleave unto his wife: and they two shall be in one flesh. Wherefore
they are no more two, but one flesh. _What therefore God hath joined
together, let not man put asunder_. They say to him: why then did
Moses command to give a bill of divorce, and to put away? He saith to
them: Moses, because of the hardness of your hearts, permitted you to put
away your wives: but from the beginning it was not so."

It is evident from these words of our Lord that the reason for the marriage of one man with only one woman, and for the perpetuity of this union, is founded in the law of nature and the primitive revelation of God to the founders of the human race. Also, that our Lord intended to restore marriage to its primitive and perfect law, abrogating all temporary dispensations in favor of polygamy and divorce. His commandment not to put asunder what God hath joined is universal, and establishes the principle that marriage is not dissoluble by human law. In the gospel of St. Mark we are further informed that "in the house again his disciples asked him concerning the same thing. And he said to them: Whosoever shall put away his wife, and marry another, committeth adultery against her. And if the wife shall put away her husband, and be married to another, she committeth adultery." (x. 11.) St. Luke also relates the words of our Lord with the same explicitness: "Every one that putteth away his wife, and marrieth another, committeth adultery; and he that marrieth her that is put away from her husband, committeth adultery." (xvi. 18.) The same doctrine is established by St. Paul in the Epistle to the Romans: "For the woman that hath a husband, whilst her husband liveth, is bound to the law: but if her husband be dead, she is loosed from the law of her husband. Wherefore, whilst her husband liveth, she shall be called an adulteress if she be with another man: but if her husband be dead, she is free from the law of her husband: so that she is not an adulteress if she be with another man." (vii. 2, 3.) This passage lays down clearly and without exception the law that the bond of marriage can only be dissolved by death. It is confirmed by other texts in the first epistle to the Corinthians: "But to them that are married, not I, but the Lord commandeth, that the wife depart not from her husband: and if she depart, that she remain unmarried, or be reconciled to her husband. And let not the husband put away his wife." "A woman is bound by the law as long as her husband liveth: but if her husband die, she is at liberty: let her marry to whom she will; only in the Lord." (vii. 10, 11, 39.)

There can be no question between us and that class of strict Protestant moralists who allow of divorce only in one case, and of re-marriage even in that one case only by the innocent party, that the passages we have cited lay down in general terms the indissolubility of Christian marriage. The only point to be discussed, therefore, is, whether they are right or wrong in so interpreting our Lord's words as to permit re-marriage in this one particular case. If it cannot be shown that our Lord distinctly and positively releases the innocent party in this case from the _vinculum matrimonii_, our proposition stands firm that this _vinculum_ is in all cases indissoluble except by death.

In regard to this point we remark, first, that obscure passages ought to be interpreted in conformity with those which are clear, and not the reverse. The passages we have cited which proclaim the indissolubility of the marriage-bond are clear. Those which are cited in proof of the exception are obscure. It is not clear on the face of them how far the permission to dismiss the guilty wife extends, and the conclusion that this permission includes the permission to marry another woman is a mere inference. {569} The Catholic interpretation, that the permission extends no further than a divorce _a mensâ et thoro_, harmonizes those passages with all others in the New Testament which speak on the subject, and is, therefore, in itself more probable.