Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 64, No. 398, December 1848

Oh! when wilt thou return
To thy spirit's early loves?
To the freshness of the morn,
To the stillness of the groves?

The summer birds are calling
The household porch around,
And the merry waters falling
With sweet laughter in their sound.

And a thousand bright-veined flowers,
From their banks of moss and fern,
Breathe of the sunny hours —
But when wilt thou return?

Oh! thou hast wandered long
From thy home without a guide;
And thy native woodland song
In thine altered heart hath died.

Thou hast flung the wealth away,
And the glory of thy spring;
And to thee the leaves' light play
Is a long-forgotten thing.

There is something very touching in the simplicity of these pleasures, contrasted with what imagination immediately suggests of the career and the tastes of the prodigal.

One great spectacle in nature alone, seems strangely to have lost its fascination upon our poetess – she never kindled to the sea. She seemed to view it as the image only of desolation and of ruin; to have associated it only with tempests and wreck, and have seen in it only the harmless waste of troubled waters. More than once she adopts a scriptural phrase – "And there shall be no more sea," as an expression of singular joy and congratulation. We question whether a single reader of her poems has ever felt the force of the expression as she did. The sea, next to the sky, is the grandest and most beautiful thing given to the eyes of man. But, by some perverse association, she never saw it in its natural beauty and sublimity, but looked at it always as the emblem of ruthless and destroying power. In The Last Song of Sappho, it is singular how much more the dread sea, into which Sappho is about to fling herself, possesses her imagination than the moral tempest within of that hapless poetess: —

Sound on, thou dark unslumbering sea!
Sound in thy scorn and pride!
I ask not, alien world, from thee
What my own kindred earth has still denied.

.          .          .          .             .

Yet glory's light hath touched my name,
The laurel-wreath is mine —
With a lone heart, a weary frame,
O restless deep! I come to make them thine!

Give to that crown, that burning crown,
Place in thy darkest hold!
Bury my anguish, my renown,
With hidden wrecks, lost gems, and wasted gold.

And with what an indignant voice, and with what a series of harshest epithets, does she call upon the sea to deliver up its human prey, in the fine spirited poem, called —

THE TREASURES OF THE DEEP

What hidest thou in thy treasure-caves and cells,
Thou hollow-sounding and mysterious main?
Pale glistening pearls and rainbow-coloured shells,
Bright things which gleam unrecked of and in vain!
Keep, keep thy riches, melancholy sea!
We ask not such from thee.

Yet more, the depths have more! – what wealth untold,
Far down, and shining through their stillness, lies!
Thou hast the starry gems, the burning gold,
Torn from ten thousand royal Argosies!
Sweep o'er thy spoils, thou wild and wrathful main!
Earth claims not these again.

Yet more, the depths have more! – thy waves have rolled
Above the cities of a world gone by!
Sand hath filled up the palaces of old,
Sea-weed o'ergrown the halls of revelry —
Dash o'er them, ocean! in thy scornful play!
Man yields them to decay.

Yet more! the billows and the depths have more!
High hearts and brave are gathered to thy breast!
They hear not now the booming waters roar,
The battle-thunders will not break their rest.
Keep thy red gold and gems, thou stormy grave!
Give back the true and brave.

Give back the lost and, lovely! – those for whom
The place was kept at board and hearth so long!
The prayer went up through midnight's breathless gloom,
And the vain yearning woke midst festal song.
Hold fast thy buried isles, thy towers o'er-thrown,
But all is not thine own.

To thee the love of woman hath gone down;
Dark flow thy tides o'er manhood's noble head —
O'er youth's bright locks, and beauty's flowery crown;
Yet must thou hear a voice – Restore the dead!
Earth shall reclaim her precious things from thee!
Restore the dead, thou sea!

But if she loved in nature, pre-eminently, the beautiful and the serene – or what she could represent as such to her imagination – it was otherwise with human life. Here the stream of thought ran always in the shade, reflecting in a thousand shapes the sadness which had overshadowed her own existence. Yet her sadness was without bitterness or impatience – it was a resigned and Christian melancholy; and if the spirit of man is represented as tossed from disappointment to disappointment, there is always a brighter and serener world behind, to receive the wanderer at last. She writes Songs for Summer Hours, and the first is devoted to Death! and a beautiful chant it is. Death is also in Arcadia; and the first thing we meet with in the land of summer is the marble tomb with the "Et in Arcadia Ego." One might be excused for applying to herself her own charming song, —

A WANDERING FEMALE SINGER

Thou hast loved and thou hast suffered!
Unto feeling deep and strong,
Thou hast trembled like a harp's frail string —