—’To the Rev. F. D. Maurice’.
Or here of waters falling high up on mountains:—
Their thousand wreaths of dangling
water-smoke.
Or of a water-fall seen at a distance:—
And like a downward smoke the slender
stream
Along the cliff to fall and pause and
fall did seem.
We left the dying ebb that faintly
lipp’d
The flat red granite.
Or here of a wave:—
Like a wave in the wild North Sea Green
glimmering toward the summit bears with all Its
stormy crests that smoke against the skies Down
on a bark.
That beech will gather brown,
This maple burn itself away.
The wide-wing’d sunset of
the misty marsh.
But illustrations would be endless. Nothing seems
to escape him in
Nature. Take the following:—
Like a purple beech among the greens
Looks out of place.
Delays as the tender ash delays
To clothe herself, when all the woods
are green.
As black as ash-buds in the front of
March.
—’The Gardener’s Daughter’.
A gusty April morn
That puff’d the swaying branches
into smoke.
So with flowers, trees, birds and insects:—
The fox-glove clusters dappled bells.
Rays round with flame its disk of seed.
Tufts of rosy-tinted snow.
A million emeralds break from the
ruby-budded lime.
In gloss and hue the chestnut, when
the shell
Divides threefold to show the fruit within.
Or of a chrysalis:—
And flash’d as those Dull-coated
things, that making slide apart Their dusk wing
cases, all beneath there burns A Jewell’d
harness, ere they pass and fly.
Wan-sallow, as the plant that feeds
itself,
Root-bitten by white lichen.
All the silvery gossamers
That twinkle into green and gold.
His epithets are in themselves a study: “the
dewy-tassell’d wood,” “the
tender-pencill’d shadow,” “crimson-circl’d
star,” the “hoary clematis,”
“creamy spray,” “dry-tongued
laurels”. But whatever he describes is
described with the same felicitous vividness.
How magical is this in the verses to Edward Lear:—
