Thomas Humphry Ward, ed. The English Poets. 1880–1918.rnVol. IV. The Nineteenth Century: Wordsworth to Rossetti

Hartley Coleridge (1796–1849)

Stanzas: ‘She was a queen of noble Nature’s crowning’

SHE was a queen of noble Nature’s crowning,

A smile of hers was like an act of grace;

She had no winsome looks, no pretty frowning,

Like daily beauties of the vulgar race:

But if she smiled, a light was on her face,

A clear, cool kindliness, a lunar beam

Of peaceful radiance, silvering o’er the stream

Of human thought with unabiding glory;

Not quite a waking truth, not quite a dream,

A visitation, bright and transitory.

But she is changed,—hath felt the touch of sorrow,

No love hath she, no understanding friend;

Oh grief! when heaven is forced of earth to borrow

What the poor niggard earth has not to lend;

But when the stalk is snapt, the rose must bend.

The tallest flower that skyward rears its head,

Grows from the common ground, and there must shed

Its delicate petals. Cruel fate, too surely,

That they should find so base a bridal bed,

Who lived in virgin pride, so sweet and purely.

She had a brother, and a tender father,

And she was loved, but not as others are

From whom we ask return of love,—but rather

As one might love a dream; a phantom fair

Of something exquisitely strange and rare,

Which all were glad to look on, men and maids,

Yet no one claimed—as oft, in dewy glades

The peering primrose, like a sudden gladness,

Gleams on the soul, yet unregarded fades;—

The joy is ours, but all its own the sadness.

’Tis vain to say—her worst of grief is only

The common lot, which all the world have known;

To her ’tis more, because her heart is lonely,

And yet she hath no strength to stand alone,—

Once she had playmates, fancies of her own,

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.