Hugh Stuart Boyd
HIS BLINDNESS
To whom was inscribed, in grateful affection, my poem of " Cyprus Wine." There comes a moment in life when even gratitude and affection turn to pain, as they do now with me. This excellent and learned man, enthusiastic for the good and the beautiful, and one of the most simple and upright of human beings, passed out of his long darkness through death in the summer of 1848; Dr. Adam Clarke's daughter and biographer, Mrs. Smith (happier in this than the absent), fulfilling a doubly filial duty as she sat by the deathbed of her father's friend and hers. — E. B. B.
God would not let the spheric lights accost
This God-loved man, and bade the earth stand off
With all her beckoning hills whose golden stuff
Under the feet of the royal sun is crossed.
Yet such things were to him not wholly lost, —
Permitted, with his wandering eyes light proof,
To catch fair visions rendered full enough
By many a ministrant accomplished ghost, —
Still seeing, to sounds of softly-turned book-leaves,
Sappho's crown - rose, and Meleager's Spring,
And Gregory's starlight on Greek-burnished eves:
Till Sensuous and Unsensuous seemed one thing,
Viewed from one level, — earth's reapers at the sheaves
Scarce plainer than Heaven's angels on the wing.
To whom was inscribed, in grateful affection, my poem of " Cyprus Wine." There comes a moment in life when even gratitude and affection turn to pain, as they do now with me. This excellent and learned man, enthusiastic for the good and the beautiful, and one of the most simple and upright of human beings, passed out of his long darkness through death in the summer of 1848; Dr. Adam Clarke's daughter and biographer, Mrs. Smith (happier in this than the absent), fulfilling a doubly filial duty as she sat by the deathbed of her father's friend and hers. — E. B. B.
God would not let the spheric lights accost
This God-loved man, and bade the earth stand off
With all her beckoning hills whose golden stuff
Under the feet of the royal sun is crossed.
Yet such things were to him not wholly lost, —
Permitted, with his wandering eyes light proof,
To catch fair visions rendered full enough
By many a ministrant accomplished ghost, —
Still seeing, to sounds of softly-turned book-leaves,
Sappho's crown - rose, and Meleager's Spring,
And Gregory's starlight on Greek-burnished eves:
Till Sensuous and Unsensuous seemed one thing,
Viewed from one level, — earth's reapers at the sheaves
Scarce plainer than Heaven's angels on the wing.
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