Volume 2 — From The Month. THE POEMS OF ADELAIDE ANNE PROCTER. [Footnote 147]

The appearance of the beautiful edition of Miss Procter's poems lately issued among the Christmas gift-books of the season forms a fitting occasion for some remarks upon the special character and genius of the authoress whose verses are inscribed upon its delicately-toned pages. Of both the first and second series of Miss Procters "Legends and Lyrics" numerous editions have been called for by the public: they are now collected into a quarto, illustrated by many excellent artists, and are prefaced by a slight biographical introduction from the pen of Mr. Charles Dickens, who, being intimately acquainted with Miss Procter's family, had known her from her early girlhood, and entertained for her the truest admiration and the most cordial esteem.

In attempting an analysis of Miss Procter's poetry, we may well preface it by a few words concerning her life and character, because these were the roots of her verse. To speak of the dead is at all times a sacred thing, demanding heedful words and careful justice. To speak of the beloved dead is always a doubly difficult task, requiring a specially sober modesty of expression, even while giving some scope to that instinctive power of true appreciation which affection best insures. The writer of these pages knew and loved her long and well; and in so far is qualified to speak of what she was: yet of a nature which was all womanly, and which retained to its last earthly moments a singular charm of childlike playfulness and innocence—having been, as it were, at all times sheltered from life's rougher experiences—it is not quite easy so to speak as to bring out a distinctive image to those who knew it not.

Adelaide Anne Procter was born in October, 1825, in Bedford Square, London; the eldest child, the "sweet beloved first-born," of Brian Waller Procter, best known to literature as Barry Cornwall. We have often heard her described as she was at three years old—"the prettiest little fairy ever seen," with fair delicate features and great blue eyes; always frail in health, but exceedingly intelligent. Mr. Dickens tells of a tiny album, made of note-paper, into which her favorite passages of poetry were copied for her by her mother's hand before she herself could write; and she very soon began to acquire foreign languages, and even to learn geometry. One of her early accomplishments was drawing—she composed little figure pieces with grace and facility; and we remember hearing from a loving relative of Miss Procter's, many long years ago, of a certain set of sketches of the Seven Ages of Man, done by her in pencil when she was yet a little girl. Being at the time still younger, we heard of it with a sort of admiring awe, which it is now pathetic to remember; considering in our own mind what a wonderful and even alarming little girl this must be. Some five-and-twenty years later (since her death) those little sketches came to light; the sight of them smiting upon the heart with the memory of that long-ago conversation, so full of fond hope and pride.

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Miss Procter was very thoroughly educated, and from her youth went much into society, possessing in a marked degree the best characteristics of a woman of the world. Mr. Dickens says that she had nothing of the conventional poetess about her; was neither melancholy, nor affected, nor self-absorbed. What she had, was the ease, the polish, and the extreme readiness which we are taught to consider the traditionary charm of a Frenchwoman of the old school. To perfect self-possession she added a sort of feminine mastery of those about her. Single out any of the famous Parisians gifted with the power to win and to keep, and imagine this sort of power grafted on to a nature au fond very simple and sterling; and thus the reader will attain to a conception of what she was in social life. She had deep and strong feeling, which she poured out in her poetry; but it did not come uppermost in her conversation. That was always vivid and usually lively, and, moreover, edged with marvellous finesse. "Sweet-briar" one loving friend used to call her.

Her outward life was not very varied; but her conversion to the Catholic faith, which took place when she was about four-and-twenty, gave her a wide circle of intellectual interests beyond those of ordinary English minds. Two years later she went to Piedmont, and passed a year with a relative there. She always recalled this Italian experience with lively pleasure; and it colored many of her poems. Her letters home were very lively and pictorial, showing that she would have excelled in prose composition.

Of her first entrance into literature Mr. Dickens has given an amusing account: how she sent poems to Household Words under the signature of Miss Berwick, and how at the office they all made up their minds she was a governess; and how Miss Berwick turned out, after all, to be the daughter of his old friend Barry Cornwall, who preferred to win her spurs with her visor down. When, some years later, she was with much difficulty induced to collect her poems into a volume, with her name, their success was immediate; both that volume and a second series passed through edition after edition, till she truly became a household word in England.

There is not, alas! very much more to tell. Just when she became famous, and opportunities of literary exertion were opening on every side, her health began to fail. For three or four years before her declared illness she was very delicate, and, with the fatal animation of her peculiar temperament, always overworking herself. But that dread malady, consumption, the scourge of England, can rarely be averted when once it has marked its prey. In November, 1862, her increasing illness first confined her to her room, and very shortly to her bed. For fifteen long months she lay there, wasting gradually away; yet not only was she patient and thoroughly resigned, but up to the very last her bright cheerfulness never quite deserted her. When not actually in pain, she would enter into conversation with all her old zest, taking just the same interest in her friends and their affairs; lively, sympathetic, and helpful to the end. On the very last evening of all, one of her friends, thinking to interest her in the old pursuit, brought her a little poem in proof. It was a Catholic ballad for The Lamp, Miss Procter was sitting up in bed, supported by pillows. She was too weak to speak any unnecessary word; but her large blue eyes roused into their wonted intelligence as she listened; and then, with the sweet sympathy which she at all times gave to others, she made a slight applauding motion with those slender wasted fingers, and smiled into the reader's face. It was such a very slight thing, and yet so utterly characteristic—courtesy and kindness and a sort of unselfish readiness surviving to the very end.

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That night, an hour after midnight, on the 2d of February, the summons came. She had been reading a little book—trying to read, rather—and as the clock was on the stroke of one she shut it up, and with some sudden mysterious rush of consciousness, having suffered greatly all the evening from oppressed breathing, she asked quietly of her mother, who was holding her in her arms:

"Do you think I am dying, mamma?"

"I think you are very, very ill tonight, my dear."

"Send for my sister. My feet are so cold—lift me up."

Her sister entering as they raised her, she said: "It has come at last."

And then, with so soft a change that the anxious eyes bent upon those sunken features could hardly detect the moment of her ceasing to breathe, death came to the beloved of so many hearts. The prayers of the Church, of which she was so devoted a child, were audibly uplifted throughout that closing scene; they were the last earthly sounds that can have reached the dulling ear. Opposite to her, as she lay upon her little bed, was a photograph from that loveliest image by Francia of the dead Saviour lying upon his mother's knees. At all times ardently religious, the last days of her frail life were elevated and cheered by the holy rites of her faith. As she lay in her coffin, a crucifix upon her breast, and camellias and violets sprinkled over her fair white garments, she looked the loveliest image of peace which a pure and pious life could bequeath to perishable clay. The delicate face was but little changed. Up to the very last it had retained its bright spiritual expression, just as her voice had retained its musical inflections, and her smile its blended charm of affectionate sympathy and childlike gaiety. In death that smile had vanished for ever, but something of its sweetness still lingered about the brow and mouth. The tapers for which she had asked a little while previously (for the due keeping of Candlemas-day) burnt at the head of the coffin, and shed their soft light down upon that still face. When at length it was covered up from mortal sight, and all that remained of her laid in the grave at St. Mary's Cemetery, the sun shone out with the first cheerfulness of early spring. Coming from behind a little cloud, that sunshine lit up the white vestment of the priest, who, standing by her coffin in the little chapel, spoke of the joyful resurrection of the children of God. There is a little garden upon that simple grave, where fresh flowers bloom every spring; and beside it many prayers are offered up with each returning season of the year.

But we must linger no longer on memories and associations which are almost too sacred for more than a passing word. To the world at large Miss Procter is known through her genius only; but it is, perhaps, not too much to say, that through it she is also endeared in a singular degree to thousands who never looked upon her face. To some consideration of her poems we will therefore address ourselves; the less reluctantly that they were truly so much a revelation of her life.

If canons of criticism be based on something deeper than mere superficial rules in regard to the expression of the sublime and youthful, it must be doubly interesting to trace the causes of a wide-spread popularity attaching to any series of works from the same pen. Such an appreciation cannot be won by a trick of form, or by a deliberate appeal to well-known popular sympathies. It must arise from the touching of universal emotions; from a true correspondence with those thoughts and feelings which are the heritage of the race under its most general conditions, or which have become the common property of a people in all its various grades of culture.

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There are two theories regarding the nature of poetry and of that Genius which creates poetry, whether in literature or in the sphere of any art. They will never be harmonized; for, like many other opinions, doctrines, and theories, of which we are separately forced to acknowledge the truth, they are irreconcilable by any effort of the human understanding. One of these theories says that genius is rare, recondite, unusual; that its creations are, by the very nature of things, little likely to be appreciated; that, indeed, the higher and the deeper it is, the more likelihood there is that it will not be entered into by numbers. Such genius found its embodiment in the phantasmagoria of Blake, in the poetry of Shelley, in the profound insight of this or that thinker. It is the vivid but momentary flash of lightning irradiating a sombre sky; it is the gnarled and solitary pine; the deep still tarn upon the mountain-side; it is the vein of bright ore buried in the darkness of the mine; the electric thrill evoked from inert matter, interesting, delightful, and suggestive from the very strangeness of its apparition. Who shall deny this is one definition of genius, one way of picturing the idea of high art?

But there is another theory, which says that genius is that which possesses the faculty of incarnating universal affections in a type readily and instinctively appropriated by the imagination; that it painted the Huguenots, and wrought out the image of Jeanie Deans; that it sung the simple melody of "Auld Robin Gray," and accumulated the massive choruses of Handel; that—putting aside those greatest men, the Shakespeares, Groethes, and Raphaels, regarding whom criticism or definition are alike exhaustless and for ever inconclusive—the most admirable genius is that which thrills in the ballads, the religions literature, and imitative art of a people, and which a whole nation "will not willingly let die." Such genius, such art, is like the fair sunshine upon corn-fields, the rippling of the running stream, the silver surface of the lake, the profuse luxuriance of spring and autumn woodlands. It embodies light, air, and the song of birds, the solemnity of the universal twilight, and the radiance of the universal dawn. Almost every one can see and feel it in some wise, though the keenness of the appreciation will be in proportion to the sensitiveness of the eye and ear. Who shall deny that this is another and equally true description of the highest genius and the noblest art?

The poems we are now considering, and which have won such general admiration wherever they have become known, belong to the latter class of works of art. Their simple, delicate beauty appeals alike to men and women, and to the soul of the young child; their transparent clearness is that of an unusually lucid intellect; their profoundness is only that of a believing heart. She who wrote them would often say, with a certain characteristic simplicity, "I only write verses—I do not write poetry;" and would fasten upon the products of some powerful and mystic mind as an illustration of what genuine poetry ought to be. But the mis-estimate was great. The absolute absence of claptrap, of any appeal to the passions of the hour or the popular idols of the English people, showed that if these volumes lay on so many tables, and their contents were so often sung and quoted in public and in private, as expressing just that which everybody had wanted to say, the reason lay deeper than the ring of the verse-writer who knows how to play into the fancy of the multitude. They are popular because they are instinct with dainty feminine genius, and reach the hearts of others with the sure precise touch of slender fingers awakening the silver chords of a harp.

Three volumes originally comprised the whole of Miss Procter's writings: a first and second series of legends and lyrics, and one of religious poems, published for a night-refuge {841} kept by Sisters of Mercy. The two former have now been printed in this rich quarto by Messrs. Bell & Daldy; and it may not be amiss to say that the whole three have been republished in America in one small but excellently got-up volume, at once a casket and a shrine (Ticknor & Fields, Boston). Of the secular poems now brought before our English public in so beautiful a dress, we would attempt a slight analysis of contents. There are fourteen legends or stories, long and short—little tales in verse, of which the gist generally lies in some very subtle and pathetic situation of the human heart. Anything like violent wrong or the ravages of unruly passion seemed rarely to cross this gentle imagination; and yet the legends are nearly all sorrowful; but the sorrow seems to spring from nobody's fault and perhaps for that very reason it is all the more sorrowful, for repentance will not wash it away. Little dead children borne to heaven on the bosom of the angels while their mothers weep below; or a dying mother, dying amidst the splendors of an earl's home, and calling to her bedside the son of an earlier and humbler marriage, revealing herself to him at the last; or the history of a stepmother, long loved but late wedded, and who had given up the lover of her own youth to a younger friend, and afterward taken the charge of that friend's jealous and reluctant children; or the pitiful tale, since elaborately wrought out by Tennyson in his "Enoch Arden," of the sailor who returns home to find his wife the wife of another man. In one and all the pathos is wrought out and expressed with the most extraordinary delicacy of touch. The reader says to himself, "Nay, is it so sad after all?" And yet it is; sad and spiritually hopeful too; sad for this earth, hopeful for heaven. This seems the irresistible conclusion of almost every tale; even the story of the stepmother, supposed to come quite right at last, is made inexpressibly plaintive by being told by the first wife's nurse—she who "knew so much," and had lived with her young mistress from childhood, and would not call the cold husband unkind; "but she had been used to love and praise."

In others of these legends the telling of the tale is simpler, the pathos more direct, but almost always strangely subtle. In "Three Evenings of a Life" a sister sacrifices her own hopes of married life that she may devote herself to a young brother who needs her care. But the young brother marries—a catastrophe which she does not seem to have contemplated; and she finds too late that her sacrifice was useless; and, what was worse, that the bride is ill-fitted to sustain him in his life or in his art; and the unhappy sister

Herbert sickens and dies, leaving the poor weak little Dora to Alice's care; and we are told how Alice cherishes her, and bears with her waywardness through sad weeks of depression, till news comes in spring that Leonard—the rejected lover—is returning from India. Now Alice is free! Now she may love Leonard and lean upon his strength. He comes; the little household smiles once more. Summer succeeds to spring; when one twilight hour Alice is aware of the perfume of flowers brought into their London home. She goes out into the passage, and through a half-opened door hears Leonard's voice:

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Very tender and touching is the description of the forlorn woman's recoil upon her brother's memory:

One of the most highly finished of the legends is "A Tomb in Ghent," setting forth the life of a humble musician and his young daughter. It contains lovely touches of description both of music and architecture. How the youth knelt prayerfully in St. Bavon—

Not only what he heard, but what he saw, is thus exquisitely imaged in words:

The second critical division of Miss Procter's poems comprises those beautiful lyrics, many of which have been set to music, and all of which are full of the melody of rhythms—inspired, as it were, by a delicate AEolian harmony, having its source in the fine intangible instinct of the poet's ear. Amidst more than a hundred of such short poems and songs, selection seems nearly impossible to the critic. Many of the little pieces and many of the separate verses are destined to float on the surface of English literature with the same secure buoyancy as Herrick's "Daffodils," or Lyttleton's verses to his fair wife Lucy, or Wordsworth's picture of the maid who dwelt by the banks of Dove. They have that short felicity of expression, that perfect finish in their parts, that cause such poems to abide in the memory, or, as the expression is, to "dwell in the imagination." In the six verses of "The Chain,"

is one—the third—which exemplifies our assertion. It reads like one of those immemorial quotations we have known from infancy:

Two songs, written in the quaint, irregular metre delighted in by the seventeenth-century poets, seem like forgotten scraps by one of the more elegant contemporaries of Milton; these are, "A Doubting Heart," and "A Lament for the Summer," of which the first and last verses are instinct with the feelings of October days:

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Equally musical, but full of the more personal sentiment of our century, is that lovely song, "A Shadow," beginning,

Quite different in tone, full of ringing harmony, is the little poem of "Now?"

And so on, through four spirited verses. Something in these strikes the ear as peculiarly illustrative of the active pious spirit of her who wrote them, of the voice whose every tone was so dear, and of the smile whose arch intelligence conveyed the same expression of lively decision.

We must now bring our remarks to a close, having tried to indicate the different qualities of Miss Procter's verse. The permanent place which it will retain in English literature it is not for us to decide. She has had the power to strike the heart of her own generation by its simple pathos. That it is purely original of its kind can hardly be denied; but it is hard, if not impossible, so far to separate ourselves from the standard of our own generation as to judge where the limits of the special, and therefore the transient, elements of fame are passed. But we at least must not be wanting in gratitude to one of the sweetest singers of the day that was hers and our own.