Lately our poets loitered in green lanes, Upon the flowers thro' which Ilissus flows. When Helen first saw wrinkles in her face That made the men as faithless. But when you Found them, or fancied them, and would not hear Or the impression of some amorous hair Say ye, that years roll on and ne'er return? And Mensola ! that ye have seen at once FRIENDS. How often, when life's summer day You smiled, you spoke, and I believed, There are who say we are but dust, Why, why repine, my pensive friend, Some the stern Fates will never lend, I see the rainbow in the sky, With folded arms I linger not To call them back-'twere vain: CHILDREN PLAYING IN A CHURCHYARD. Children, keep up that harmless play, Be prompt his Holy word to hear, Ten summers hence the sprightliest lad Ere many days the last will close. Ah! what avails the sceptered race! Rose Aylmer, whom these wakeful eyes A night of memories and sighs I consecrate to thee. ON SOUTHEY'S DEATH. Friends, hear the words my wandering thoughts would say And cast them into shape some other day; Southey, my friend of forty years, is gone, And, shattered by the fall, I stand alone. An aged man who loved to doze away 'I never thought, O youth, That thou, altho' so cherisht, would'st return, But I did think that he who came with thee, Love, who could swear more sweetly than birds sing, A sigh broke through his slumber, not the last. FOR AN EPITAPH AT FIESOLE. Lo! where the four mimosas blend their shade, And he had lived enough when he had dried her tear BRYAN WALLER PROCTER. [BRYAN WALLER PROCTER was born in London Nov. 21, 1787. He was educated, with Byron, at Harrow; studied as a solicitor in the country; returned to London to live in 1807. His period of literary activity extended from 1815 to 1823. In 1832 he was made Metropolitan Commissioner of Lunacy, a post which he resigned in 1851. He died Oct 4, 1874. His principal works, all published under the pseudonym of Barry Cornwall, are Dramatic Scenes, 1819; Marcian Colonna, 1820; A Sicilian Story, 1821; Mirandola, 1821; The Flood of Thessaly, 1823; English Songs, 1832.] Barry Cornwall was a very fluent and accomplished artist in verse rather than what we usually understand by a poet. He had nothing bardic or prophetic in his nature, he was burdened with no special message to mankind, and he gave no sign of ever feeling very strongly on any particular point or occasion. The critic is curiously baffled in seeking for a poetical or personal individuality in his verse, for he never seems to be expressing anything in his own person. This negative quality forms the chief characteristic of his best work, his English Songs. All other known lyrists have either recorded in their songs their personal experiences in emotion, or they have so framed their verses as to seem to do so; Barry Cornwall alone has contrived to write songs of a purely and obviously impersonal and artificial kind, dealing dramatically with feelings which the poet does not himself pretend to experience. His fragments of drama are lyrical, his lyrics dramatic, and each class suffers somewhat from this intrusion into the domain of the other. We hardly do justice to the merit of verse which is so impartial as to become almost uninteresting, and Procter has suffered from his retiring modesty no less than other poets from their arrogance. His lyrics do not possess passion or real pathos or any very deep magic of melody, but he has written more songs |