SONNET. Long time a child, and still a child, when years TO A LOFTY BEAUTY, FROM HER POOR Kinsman. Fair maid, had I not heard thy baby cries, Yet wooing still a parent's watchful eyes, Thy brow, where Beauty sits to tyrannize O'er humble love, had made me sadly fear thee; Old times unqueen thee, and old loves endear thee. MAY, 1840. A lovely morn, so still, so very still, It hardly seems a growing day of Spring, Save when the wee wren flits with stealthy wing, TO A DEAF AND DUMB LITTLE GIRL. Like a loose island on the wide expanse, What can she know of beaut[eous] or sublime? STANZAS. She was a queen of noble Nature's crowning, Of peaceful radiance, silvering o'er the stream But she is changed,—hath felt the touch of sorrow, Oh grief! when heaven is forced of earth to borrow Grows from the common ground, and there must shed That they should find so base a bridal bed, She had a brother, and a tender father, 'Tis vain to say-her worst of grief is only And she did love them. They are past away As Fairies vanish at the break of day; And like a spectre of an age departed, Or unsphered Angel woefully astray, She glides along-the solitary hearted. SONG. She is not fair to outward view As many maidens be, Her loveliness I never knew Until she smiled on me ; Oh! then I saw her eye was bright, But now her looks are coy and cold, And yet I cease not to behold SUMMER RAIN. Thick lay the dust, uncomfortably white, The woods and mountains slept in hazy light; Sudden the hills grew black, and hot as stove A flash-a crash—the firmament was split, WILLIAM MOTHERWELL. [WILLIAM MOTHERWELL, born in Glasgow in 1797, became a ' limb of the law' in 1819, being then appointed to the office of Sheriff Clerk Depute at Paisley. In 1828 he put his literary talent at the service of his party, edited a Tory newspaper, The Paisley Advertiser, and afterwards The Glasgow Courier. The strain of journalism proved too much for him, and he died of apoplexy at the early age of thirty-seven. A small volume of poems, narrative and lyrical, published in 1832, was the only fruit of his fine poetic gifts.] Motherwell's reputation in his own country as a poet was made by the plaintive song of Jeanie Morrison, a sweet and touching reminiscence of pleasant days spent with a school playfellow and child sweetheart. This and another song in the Scotch dialect, My heid is like to break, in which a betrayed damsel harrows up the feelings of her seducer with pitiless pathos, may be said to be the only two lyrics of his that have taken any hold of fame. They prove him to have been a man of keen sensibility; he was also a man of vigorous intellect and large culture, more of a student and a scholar than any contemporary Scotch lyrist. He wrote but little in verse-after he reached the prime of manhood his powers were wasted in vehement partisan support of a hopeless cause-but the little that he did write was not in the minor key of the songs in his native dialect. The exploits of the Vikings fascinated his imagination, and as the bard of these sturdy warriors he sang with a vigour that entitles him to be named as a link between Gray and Collins and Mr. William Morris. Motherwell found in the mighty deeds and haughty spirit of the irresistible masters of the sea more congenial themes than the woes and the aspirations of the Jacobites of which the literary world by his time was becoming somewhat weary, and revelled in the fresh field with eager delight. The most touching of his poems in its personal emotion, I am not sad, shows him resigned to 'the sadness of a nameless tomb,' but it is hard to believe that the wealth and variety of power evidenced in such poems as The Madman's Love, and his two songs in the Scotch dialect could have rested unused. W. MINTO. |