Friendship

Posted on September 24, 2016 Updated on August 2, 2016

When we were idlers with the loitering rills,
The need of human love we little noted:
Our love was nature; and the peace that floated
On the white mist, and dwelt upon the hills,
To sweet accord subdued our wayward wills:
One soul was ours, one mind, one heart devoted,
That, wisely doting, ask’d not why it doted,
And ours the unknown joy, which knowing kills.
But now I find how dear thou wert to me;
That man is more than half of nature’s treasure,
Of that fair beauty which no eye can see,
Of that sweet music which no ear can measure;
And now the streams may sing for others’ pleasure,
The hills sleep on in their eternity.

– Hartley Coleridge

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The Flight Of Youth

Posted on September 23, 2016 Updated on August 2, 2016

Youth, thou art fled, – but where are all the charms
Which, though with thee they came, and passed with thee,
Should leave a perfume and sweet memory
Of what they have been? All thy boons and harms
Have perished quite. Thy oft-revered alarms
Forsake the fluttering echo. Smiles and tears
Die on my cheek, or, petrified with years,
Show the dull woe which no compassion warms,
The mirth none shares. Yet could a wish, a thought,
Unravel all the complex web of age, –
Could all the characters that Time hath wrought
Be clean effaced from my memorial page
By one short word, the word I would not say; –
I thank my God because my hairs are gray.

– Hartley Coleridge

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Song

Posted on September 22, 2016 Updated on August 2, 2016

She is not fair to outward view
As many maidens be,
Her loveliness I never knew
Until she smiled on me;
O, then I saw her eye was bright,
A well of love, a spring of light!

But now her looks are coy and cold,
To mine they ne’er reply,
And yet I cease not to behold
The love-light in her eye:
Her very frowns are fairer far
Than smiles of other maidens are.

– Hartley Coleridge

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The Solitary Hearted

Posted on September 21, 2016 Updated on August 2, 2016

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;
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.
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 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.

‘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 wofully astray,
She glides along–the solitary-hearted.

– Hartley Coleridge

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