Household Verses :: :: University of Virginia Library

It stood beside the broad and billowy deep,
A humble dwelling, in its better day;
Over its thatch the winter winds would sweep,
And on its walls oft beat the ocean spray:
As years rolled on it fell into decay,
Sharing the doom that prouder piles must share,
And now its very form hath passed away,
Buried amidst the wreck of things which were;
Yet still its memory lives, cherished with grateful care.

158

For Genius hath immortalized the spot!
Blending it with the Poet's deathless name,
And casting round the memory of that cot
The potent charm of his enduring fame;
Potent—because not won by numbers tame
And common-place, in flowers of fiction drest,
But by the truth, which formed his proudest claim,
“Though Nature's sternest painter, yet the best!”
This was his highest charm, his verses' truest test.

It was not his to sing of rural swains,
In strains Arcadian, caught from days of yore;
Painting their hopes and fears, their joys and pains,
To classic models true—and nothing more;
He sang them, as he found them on the shore
Of the wild ocean, “an amphibious race;”
Yet not unmindful, in their varied store
Of good and ill, of each redeeming grace,
Though few and far between, which truth allowed to trace.

159

'Tis in the sterling truth and sober sense
Legible in his deeply moral lay,
Are found “the head and front of the offence,”
For which some still his graphic page gainsay:
Poetry was, with him, no artist's play!
But Nature's voice, the heart's interpreter;
And by this standard tested, even they
Who at his darker touches most demur,
Must own him of his themes a faithful chronicler.

Sailors and smugglers, gipsies, poachers, boors,
Fishers, and publicans; a motley throng!
The life these led, or in or out of doors,
Such, chiefly, formed the staple of his song;
His lot was cast, by circumstance, among
Those samples of our kind; and are they not
All human beings? marred by much of wrong,
And stained by many a foul and flagrant blot,
They are—yet from our race, all these, divorce them not!

160

And this is the redeeming charm that lends
Its lustre to our Suffolk Poet's page;
A spirit of humanity, which blends
Our lighter lot on life's eventful stage,
With their's whose hardships seem their heritage;
Instructing us, ere harshly we condemn,
To bear in mind the warfare they must wage,
The rougher tide which they perforce must stem!
A lesson, taught aright, that well may plead for them!

Then turn not from his pages—though they bear
The brand of much that virtue must reprove;
Much is there truest sympathy to share;
Much to be pitied; somewhat, too, to love!
It is the part of wisdom from above
To sever, as by alchymy sublime,
Feelings and impulses to vice which move,
From those which bid our spirits upward climb;
The criminal to mourn, e'en while we loathe the crime.

161

Hence those who know and feel our Poet's worth,
This frail memorial of his boyish years
Will love and cherish: here, perchance, had birth
That mastery o'er the source of smiles and tears,
Which still his minstrel memory endears;
And e'en this humble room becomes a shrine,
Where all who justly rate the hopes and fears
That round our human hearts must ever twine,
Must to his well-earned fame their grateful praise assign.