'Ah! love so sweet, and patient, and fond,
I wandered far from thy sight,
And I said to myself that the world beyond
Was a garden rich with delight.
'And there rose an image from morn to morn
Of new bewildering days,
Till my heart grew proud and I thought with scorn
Of the peaceful homely ways.
'For the young are light, and I never had learnt
To know the false from the true,
And my feet were drawn where the far lights burnt
With their wonder strange and new.
'And now how bitter to heart is the taste,
And gone are the folly and pride;
And I save what I can from the years of waste
And stand once more at thy side.'
It will be seen that the store of words at the singer's command is
limited; his palette is set with few colours; his lute has but few
strings; and it is in this that he resembles the singers of the Italian
folk-songs and couplets which have only the limited vocabulary of the
peasant to express so many of the deepest chords of human feeling. These
English verses might, like those Italian _canzone_, be created by one to
whom all the stores of knowledge and of culture were sealed books. They
are cast in the simplest of all possible forms of expression, and there
is not one which would not suit the plaintive measure of a crooning
ballad sung in twilight by the embers of a cottage hearth. They suggest
their own music, and it would be difficult to read them aloud without
falling into some rhythmical balance of their lines.
Auberon Herbert is, we know by his prose works, master of rich stores of
language and of scholarship; therefore this simplicity of style in his
verses springs, not from poverty of resources, but from correctness of
instinct. These songs are _naif_ as a child's prayer at its mother's
knee at eventide; were they ornate or elaborate they would cease to be,
as they are now, the frank and spontaneous utterances of the soul,
natural, I have said, as song of linnet or of lark.
Let those who love pure, simple, unstudied, and unborrowed things send
for the little azure book, and read it for themselves; not in noisy
railway train, or metropolitan library, or fashion-filled country house;
but in the solitude of some quiet rural place, beside some nameless
streamlet where the willow-leaves touch the blue brook-lime and the bees
hum amidst the flowering thyme.
When we take it home, as the day dies, let us place it on a shelf
between the hymns of George Herbert and those earliest love-songs which
were signed Owen Meredith. There it will find its fit companionship.
X