Arthur Quiller-Couch, ed. 1919. The Oxford Book of English Verse: 1250–1900.
Hartley Coleridge. 17961849643. The Solitary-Hearted
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, | 5 |
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. | 10 |
But she is changed,—hath felt the touch of sorrow, | |
No love hath she, no understanding friend; | |
O 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. | 15 |
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. | 20 |
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, | 25 |
Which all were glad to look on, men and maids, | |
Yet no one claim’d—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. | 30 |
‘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, | 35 |
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 wofully astray, | |
She glides along—the solitary-hearted. | 40 |