'The dove did lend me wings. I fled away
From the loud world which long had troubled me.
Oh, lightly did I flee when hoyden May
Threw her wild[8] mantle on the hawthorn tree.
I left the dusty highroad, and my way
Was through deep meadows, shut with copses fair,
A choir of thrushes poured its roundelay
From every hedge and every thicket there;
Mild, moon-faced kine looked on, where in the grass
All heaped I lay, from noon till eve.
And hares unwitting close to me did pass
And still the birds sang....'
[Footnote 8: Surely _wild_ is a misprint for _white_? A mantle cannot be
wild, nor is it an epithet to apply to a hawthorn tree.]
A certain similarity there is in his verse to Owen Meredith's, but this
is due to the fact that they were friends and companions always, in
youth and manhood, and that Wilfrid Blunt had an intense and adoring
sentiment for his friend which made him regard the other with a feeling
which was almost religious in its strength and sincerity.
The following sonnet might have come out of 'The Wanderer,' and I
imagine the house called here Palazzo Pagani is the villa in
Bellosguardo which in 'The Wanderer' shelters the lovers of the 'Eve
and May.'
'This is the house where twenty years ago
They spent a spring and summer. This shut gate
Would lead you to the terrace, and below
To a rose-garden long since desolate.
Here they once lived. How often I have sat
Till it was dusk among the olive trees,
Waiting to hear their coming horse hoofs graze
Upon the gravel, till the freshening breeze
Bore down a sound of voices. Even yet
A broken echo of their laughter rings
Through the deserted terraces. And see,
While I am speaking, from the parapet
There is a hand put forth, and someone flings
Her very window open overhead.
How sweet it is, the scent of rosemary,
These are the last tears I shall ever shed.'
Here the influence of Owen Meredith is very strong, but it is the
influence due to sympathy, not to imitation.
But where he is entirely unlike Owen Meredith is in his passion of pity,
which is his dominant instinct, and which in the other is rarely
perceptible. Owen Meredith was entirely personal; Wilfrid Blunt is
strongly impersonal. The sorrows of man, and of one man in especial,
constituted the be all, and end all, of the former; the woes of all
creation lie heavy on the soul of the latter. The bird with a broken
wing is to Wilfrid Blunt as pitiful a tragedy as the human lover with
his ruined joys was to the author of 'The Wanderer'; the chained eagle
dying in an iron cage is to him as cruel a captive as his own soul
pining to be free from the limits of sense and the blindness of
mortality. He reaches a high level in altruism, which is in him of a
very pure kind.