THE REVERIE OF POOR SUSAN.
AT the corner of Wood Street, when daylight appears, Hangs a thrush that sings loud—it has sung for three years; Poor Susan has passed by the spot, and has heard In the silence of morning the song of the bird.
'Tis a note of enchantment; what ails her? She sees A mountain ascending, a vision of trees;
Bright volumes of vapour through Lothbury glide, And a river flows on through the vale of Cheapside.
Green pastures she views in the midst of the dale, Down which she so often has tripped with her pail, And a single small cottage, a nest like a dove's, The one only dwelling on earth that she loves.
She looks, and her heart is in heaven: but they fade, The mist and the river, the hill and the shade:
The stream will not flow, and the hill will not rise, And the colours have all passed away from her eyes.
AN Orpheus! an Orpheus !-yes, faith may grow bold, And take to herself all the wonders of old ;
Near the stately Pantheon you'll meet with the same, In the street that from Oxford hath borrowed its name.
His station is there ;-and he works on the crowd, He sways them with harmony merry and loud, He fills with his power all their hearts to the brim- Was aught ever heard like his fiddle and him?
What an eager assembly-what an empire is this! The weary have life, and the hungry have bliss ; The mourner is cheered, and the anxious have rest; And the guilt-burthened soul is no longer oppressed.
As the moon brightens round her the clouds of the night, So he, where he stands, is a centre of light!
It gleams on the face, there, of dusky-browed Jack, And the pale-visaged baker's, with basket on back.
That errand-bound 'prentice was passing in hasteWhat matter! he's caught-and his time runs to wasteThe newsman is stopped, though he stops on the fret, And the half-breathless lamplighter, he's in the net!
The porter sits down on the weight that he bore : The lass with her barrow wheels hither her store; If a thief could be here he might pilfer at ease; She sees the musician, 'tis all that she sees!
He stands backed by the wall; he abates not his din; His hat gives him vigour, with boons dropping in,
From the old and the young, from the poorest-and there! The one-pennied boy has his penny to spare.
O blest are the hearers, and proud be the hand
Of the pleasure it spreads through so thankful a band; I am glad for him, blind as he is !—all the while If they speak 'tis to praise, and they praise with a smile.
That tall man, a giant in bulk and in height, Not an inch of his body is free from delight; Can he keep himself still, if he would? oh, not he! The music stirs in him like wind through a tree.
There's a cripple who leans on his crutch; like a tower That long has leaned forward, leans hour after hour !— A mother, whose spirit in fetters is bound,
While she dandles the babe in her arms to the sound.
Now, coaches and chariots! roar on like a stream; Here are twenty souls happy as souls in a dream : They are deaf to your murmurs-they care not for you, Nor what ye are flying, nor what ye pursue!
While my fellow-traveller and I were walking by the side of Loch Katrine, one fine evening after sunset, in our road to a hut, where, in the course of our tour, we had been hospitably entertained some weeks before, we met, in one of the loneliest parts of that solitary region, two well-dressed women, one of whom said to us, by way of greeting, "What, you are stepping westward?"
"What, you are stepping westward?"—" Yea." 'Twould be a wildish destiny,
If we, who thus together roam
In a strange land, and far from home, Were in this place the guests of chance : Yet who would stop, or fear to advance, Though home or shelter he had none, With such a sky to lead him on?
The dewy ground was dark and cold; Behind, all gloomy to behold; And stepping westward seem'd to be A kind of heavenly destiny;
I liked the greeting: 'twas a sound Of something without place or bound; And seemed to give me spiritual right To travel through that region bright.
The voice was soft, and she who spake Was walking by her native lake;
The salutation had to me
The very sound of courtesy ;
Its power was felt; and while my eye Was fixed upon the glowing sky, The echo of the voice enwrought A human sweetness with the thought Of travelling through the world that lay Before me in my endless way.
« ПредыдущаяПродолжить » |