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70]
But go at sweet Midsummer night;
The pines with showers are spicy yet,
The birches tremble at the set
Of sun, in pale, transfigured light,
And low the savin clusters wet.
Go on between the tangled walls
Of shining twigs, that drop the rain;
Then 'round the hill, to greet again
The purple day before it falls,
And breathe the clover on the plain.
Such bits from Nature occur on the background of country life. ‘The Quilting’ and ‘The Husking’ are two companion poems, through both of which a single love story runs, troublous, but with a happy ending.
In ‘The Immortals,’
Mrs. Lowe celebrates heroes and friends that have gone from sight.
Charlotte Bronte,
Mrs. Browning,
Chatterton,
Shelley represent the
English poets;
Lowell,
Emerson,
Whittier, and
E. R. Sill, the
Americans;
Channing and
Brooks and
Charles Lowe, her husband, the ministers; to say nothing of the several friends commemorated, dearer than any stranger.
Let us choose a few stanzas from ‘
Sleepy Hollow,’ written on the occasion of
Emerson's funeral:—
They bore him up the aisle,
His white hands folded meekly on his breast;
He had the very smile
He wore the night he gently sank to rest.
The words of love were said,
We prayed and sang together; all was done;
And then the way they led
Along the street, the people following on.
We covered him with green—
He loved the hemlock branches and the pine,—
And there he lay, serene,
And yet not he, not there the spark divine.
