University of Virginia Library

My friend, I bring this little offering
To thee, assured, how small soe'er its worth,
That for the love which prompts me thou wilt love it,
And with thy love wilt make it beautiful.

How oft among thy flower-beds we have held
Free converse, where the budding yellow rose,
Prolific of its gifts the long year through,
Breaks into beauty, or the myrtle rare
With orient perfume scents the nimble breeze;
Now in the Spring, when faint-sweet violets
Peep with their dim eyes, coy, amid the leaves,
Breathing forth raptures; in the Autumn now,
When the red creeper flushes all the house,
Save where the ivy clasps around the tower,
Or trails, with wandering shoots, about the eaves
And gargoyles grim, fantastic,—fearless homes
Held by old swallows on a lease of love
Unbroken, immemorial. And at times,
When Summer rain pattered upon the leaves,
In the green cloisters of the ivy-walk
We mused, with ample range of large discourse;—
Of science broadening from phenomena
Diverse, to the great Unity which is God;
Of forces correlate, forecasting dim
Presages of a new philosophy;
Of history made meaningless, alas!
And lacking human interest, for lack
Of its diviner import, waiting still
The Epic soul. And ever with our speech
Mingled the interval of silent thought,
Not without reason, and the blithesome ring
Of cheery laughter, which had reason too,
And nimble wit and repartee, and apt
Quotation from the poets who have sung
Unchanging wisdom to a changeful world.
Then, by and by, along the breezy heights
And lichened crags orange and grey and brown,
We strolled, where mountain ash and sombre pine
Crest with their various plumage thy loved hill;
Whence looking we could spy the far-off May
Dim in the sea, the Lomonds' shadowy heights
Crowning the winding shores of kingly Fife,
North Berwick Law, the grey sea-withered scalp
Of Bass (where the wild sea-mew wings amidst
Heroic memories of a nation's sorrow
Still haunting there), and nearer Arthur Seat
Shouldering the dingy surge of mist and smoke
From his great flanks, while the old Castle looms
Darkly above the city roofs and spires,
And pillared Calton veils amid the dusk
His monumental forms, and at our feet
Nestles among the chestnuts and the elms
Jeffrey's green turret and thy happy home.
So as we walked amid the beautiful,
And shaped our speech about the beautiful
In art or nature, evermore we found,
Though years of ripened wisdom lay between us,
And varied rich experience, rare agreement
And vision eye to eye; like instruments
Of diverse form and substance which record
An unexpected harmony, each to other
Filling the chord, to make a perfect strain.
And when the Winter early closed the day,
And the log crackled, and the lamp was lit,
And the long wind howled through the groaning trees,
And the great arm-chair to the fireside drawn
Allured to mild repose, which yet the glass
Of golden sack, or generous claret purpling
The quaint old flask of Venice-work, forbade
To become vacant idleness; then we
Held high discourse of God and Destiny,
And the dear Christ of human love and hope
Gathering the weary wandering ages round
The throne which was a cross, and conquering
By His meek passion; till Theology
Stript off its sorrowful garb again, and grew
An impotent scholastic. Or at times
We talked of those whose songs had charmed our youth;
Who of them were forgot, and who were still
Daily companions, faring on the road
With us, and with a deeper meaning speaking
Unto our deepening wants: Of Wordsworth doing
A tuneful ministry of love to all
God's common creatures, till the hedgerows sung
With choiring seraphim at cottage doors;
Of Coleridge dreaming, and discoursing words
Mystic and musical—formative fire-mist
Luminous, with a star or two in it,
Deeper in heaven than any star we know,
And sweeping over vaster breadths of space:
Of Keats, whose senses were a kind of soul,
Living at every point of his fine frame,
And clothing subtlest thought in imagery
Tinted and perfumed and melodious:
Of Shelley, with the skylark singing, soaring,
And now in cloud invisible, and now
Without a cloud invisible, but still
Throbbing with passionate music, when the sense
Gurgled but half articulate: Of Hunt,
Playing with lambent lightnings innocent
About life's surface, cheerily singing, genial
And very human, and yet now and then
Unconscious, childlike, lifting up the veil,
And glancing at the holiest with wonder—
Soon lost among the pictures and the pathos
Of our familiar life: of Tennyson,
Dropping so calmly down a quiet stream—
A witchèd river, yet an English stream—
'Mong the broad lilies, and the whispering sedges,
Musing and singing, noting thoughtfully
The passionate throbbings of a troubled heart,
And passionate struggles of a wondrous age.
These all we canvassed, having sympathies
With all. Nor lacked discourse of nobler still—
Of people's Epic, and the learned muse
Of Milton; of the tragic sock, and eke
Of tragic symbol, tracking through the maze
Of sorrow and temptation the footprints
Mingled of God and man. So Goethe sang
His Faust; and so in Runic strain, unmeasured,
Guttural, yet with rarest tones of beauty,
Wailing the broken idols and the shrines
Even while he hurls them down, our modern Titan
Essays his vision of life's mystery.

Thus having shared thy fellowship, and heard
Manifold wisdom, truth profound, and pure
Utterance of taste; which I delightedly
Recall and treasure, and delightedly
Look forward to, making a threefold joy
Of hope and memory and present gladness,
I, grateful, bring mine offering to thee,
Assured thy love will scan it lovingly.