Complete Poetical Works of Charlotte Smith Read online

  SONNET XLIV. — line 7.

  Middleton is a village on the margin of the sea, in Sussex, containing only two or three houses. There were formerly several acres of ground between its small church and the sea, which now, by its continual encroachments, approaches within a few feet of this half ruined and humble edifice. The wall, which once surrounded the church-yard, is entirely swept away, many of the graves broken up, and the remains of bodies interred washed into the sea: whence human bones are found among the sand and shingles on the shore.

  SONNET XLV. — line 11.

  The enthusiast of the lyre who wander’d here.

  Collins. — See note to Sonnet XXX.

  SONNET XLVI. — line 8.

  But where now clamours the discordant hern.

  In the park at Penshurst is a heronry. The house is at present uninhabited, and the windows of the galleries and other rooms, in which there are many invaluable pictures, are never opened but when strangers visit it.

  Line 12.

  Algernon Sidney.

  SONNET LI. — line 4.

  Ospray.

  The sea-eagle.

  SONNET LIV. — line 12.

  A sweet forgetfulness of human care.

  Pope.

  SONNET LVII. — line 7.

  The lark — the shepherd’s clock.

  Shakspeare.

  line 14.

  “The mountain goddess, Liberty.”

  Milton.

  SONNET LVIII. — line 8.

  “Star of the earth.”

  Dr Darwin.

  Line 9.

  “The moisten’d blade—”

  Walcot’s beautiful Ode to the Glow-worm.

  ELEGY.

  This elegy is written on the supposition that an indigent young woman had been addressed by the son of a wealthy yeoman, who, resenting his attachment, had driven him from home, and compelled him to have recourse for subsistence to the occupation of a pilot, in which, in attempting to save a vessel in distress, he perished.

  The father dying, a tomb is supposed to be erected to his memory in the church-yard mentioned in Sonnet XLIV. And while a tempest is gathering, the unfortunate young woman comes thither; and courting the same death as had robbed her of her lover, she awaits its violence, and is at length overwhelmed by the waves.

  Verse 8. line 4.

  And fruitless call on him— ‘who cannot hear.’

  “I fruitless mourn to him who cannot hear,

  And weep the more because I weep in vain.”

  Gray’s exquisite Sonnet; in reading which it is impossible not to regret that he wrote only one.

  THE ORIGIN OF FLATTERY.

  This little poem was written almost extempore on occasion of a conversation where many pleasant things were said on the subject of flattery; and some French gentlemen who were of the party enquired for a synonym in English to the French word fleurette. The poem was inserted in the two first editions, and having been asked for by very respectable subscribers to the present, it is reprinted. The Sonnets have been thought too gloomy; and the author has been advised to insert some of a more cheerful cast. This poem may by others be thought too gay, and is indeed so little in unison with the present sentiments and feelings of its author, that it had been wholly omitted but for the respectable approbation of those to whose judgment she owed implicit deference.

  SONNET LXI. — line 1.

  Ill-omen’d bird, whose cries portentous float.

  This Sonnet, first inserted in the novel called the Old Manor House, is founded on a superstition attributed (vide Bertram’s Travels in America) to the Indians, who believe that the cry of this night hawk (Caprimulgus Americanus) portends some evil, and when they are at war, assert that it is

  never heard near their tents or habitations but to announce the death of some brave warrior of their tribe, or some other calamity.

  SONNET LXII.

  First published in the same work.

  SONNET LXIII. — line 1.

  O’er faded heath-flowers spun, or thorny furze.

  The web, charged with innumerable globules of bright dew, that is frequently on heaths and commons in autumnal mornings, can hardly have escaped the observation of any lover of nature. — The slender web of the field spider is again alluded to in Sonnet LXXVII.

  SONNET LXIV.

  First printed in the novel of “The Banished Man.”

  SONNET LXV.

  To the excellent friend and physician to whom these lines are addressed, I was obliged for the kindest attention, and for the recovery from one dangerous illness, of that beloved child whom a few months afterwards his skill and most unremitted and disinterested exertions could not save!

  SONNET LXVI.

  Written on the coast of Sussex during very tempestuous weather in December 1791, but first published in the novel of Montalbert.

  SONNET LXVII.

  Printed in the same work.

  SONNET LXX. — line 11.

  He has “no nice felicities that shrink.” ” ’Tis delicate felicity that shrinks

  When rocking winds are loud.”

  Walpole.

  SONNET LXXII. — line 1.

  Thee! “lucid arbiter ‘twixt day and night.”

  Milton.

  SONNET LXXIII. — line 5.

  “Wilt thou yet murmur at a misplaced leaf?”

  From a story (I know not where told) of a fastidious being, who, on a bed of rose leaves, complained that his or her rest was destroyed because one of those leaves was doubled.

  SONNET LXXIV. — line 1.

  “Sleep, that knits up the ravell’d sleeve of care.”

  Shakspeare.

  Line 5.

  Murmuring I hear

  The hollow wind around the ancient towers.

  These lines were written in a residence among ancient public buildings.

  SONNET LXXV.

  First published in the novel of Marchmont.

  SONNET LXXVI. — line 5.

  The base control

  Of petty despots in their pedant reign

  Already hast thou felt; —

  This was not addressed to my son, who suffered with many others in an event which will long be remembered by those parents who had sons at a certain public school, in 1793, but to another young man, not compelled as he was, in consequence of that dismission, to abandon the fairest prospects of his future life.

  SONNET LXXVII. — line 1.

  Small, viewless aeronaut, &c. &c.

  The almost imperceptible threads floating in the air, towards the end of summer or autumn, in a still evening, sometimes are so numerous as to be felt on the face and hands. It is on these that a minute species of spider convey themselves from place to place; sometimes rising with the wind to a great height in the air. Dr Lister, among other naturalists, remarked these insects. “To fly they cannot strictly be said, they being carried into the air by external force; but they can, in case the wind suffer them, steer their course, perhaps mount and descend at pleasure: and to the purpose of rowing themselves along in the air, it is observable that they ever take their flight backwards, that

  is, their head looking a contrary way like a sculler upon the Thames. It is scarcely credible to what height they will mount; which is yet precisely true, and a thing easily to be observed by one that shall fix his eye some time on any part of the heavens, the white web, at a vast distance, very distinctly appearing from the azure sky. — But this is in autumn only, and that in very fair and calm weather.” From the Encyclop. Britan.

  Dr Darwin, whose imagination so happily applies every object of natural history to the purposes of poetry, makes the goddess of Botany thus direct her Sylphs —

  “Thin clouds of Gossamer in air display,

  And hide the vale’s chaste lily from the ray.”

  These filmy threads form a part of the equipage of Mab:

  “Her waggon spokes are made of spiders’ legs,

  The cover of the wings of grasshoppers,

 
The traces of the smallest spider’s web.”

  Juliet, too, in anxiously waiting for the silent arrival of her lover, exclaims,

  “ — Oh! so light of foot

  Will ne’er wear out the everlasting flint;

  A lover may bestride the gossamer

  That idles in the wanton summer air,

  And yet not fall—”

  SONNET LXXIX.

  To the goddess of Botany.

  “Rightly to spell,”

  as Milton wishes, in Il Penseroso ,

  “Of every herb that sips the dew,”

  seems to be a resource for the sick at heart — for those who, from sorrow or disgust, may without affectation say

  “Society is nothing to one not sociable!”

  and whose wearied eyes and languid spirits find relief and repose amid the shades of vegetable nature. — I cannot now turn to any other pursuit that for a moment soothes my wounded mind.

  “Je pris gout a cette récreation des yeux, qui dans l’infortune, repose, amuse, distrait l’esprit, et suspend le sentiment des peines.”

  Thus speaks the singular, the unhappy Rousseau, when in his “Promenades” he enumerates the causes that drove him from the society of men, and occasioned his pursuing with renewed avidity the study of Botany. “I was,” says he, “Forcé de m’abstenir de penser, de peur de penser a mes malheurs malgré moi; forcé de contenir les restes d’une imagination riante, mais languissante, que tant d’angoisses pourroient effaroucher a la fin—”

  Without any pretensions to these talents which were in him so heavily taxed with that excessive irritability, too often, if not always the attendant on genius, it has been my misfortune to have endured real calamities that have disqualified me for finding any enjoyment in the pleasures and pursuits which occupy the generality of the world. I have been engaged in contending with persons whose cruelty has left so painful an impression on my mind, that I may well say

  “Brillantes fleurs, émail des pres, ombrages frais, bosquets, verdure, venez purifier mon imagination de teus ces hideux objets!”

  Perhaps, if any situation is more pitiable than that which compels us to wish to escape from the common business and forms of life, it is that where the sentiment is forcibly felt, while it cannot be indulged; and where the sufferer, chained down to the discharge of duties from which the wearied spirit recoils, feels like the wretched Lear, when Shakspeare makes him exclaim

  “Oh! I am bound upon a wheel of fire,

  Which my own tears do scald like melted lead.”

  SONNET LXXX.

  To the Invisible Moon.

  I know not whether this is correctly expressed — I suspect that it is not. — What I mean, however, will surely be understood — I address the Moon when not visible at night in our hemisphere.

  “The sun to me is dark,

  And silent as the moon

  When she deserts the night,

  Hid in her secret interlunar cave.”

  Milton, Samps. Agon.

  SONNET LXXXI.

  First printed in a publication for the use of young persons, called “Rambles Farther.”

  Line 6.

  Where briony and woodbine fringe the trees.

  Briony, Bryonia dioica, foliis palmatis, &c. White Briony, growing plentifully in woods and hedges, and twisting around taller plants.

  Line 8.

  “Murmur their fairy tunes in praise of flowers,”

  a line taken, I believe , from a poem called “Vacuna,” printed in Dodsley’s collection.

  SONNET LXXXII.

  To the Shade of Burns.

  Whoever has tasted the charm of original genius so evident in the composition of this genuine poet,

  A poet “of nature’s own creation,”

  cannot surely fail to lament his unhappy life, (latterly passed, as I have understood, in an employment to which such a mind as his must have been averse,) nor his premature death. For one, herself made the object of subscription , is it proper to add, that whoever has thus been delighted with the wild notes of the Scottish bard, must have a melancholy pleasure in relieving by their benevolence, the unfortunate family he has left?

  Line 14.

  “Enjoys the liberty it loved—” Pope.

  SONNET LXXXIII. — line 1.

  The upland shepherd, as reclined he lies.

  Suggested by the recollection of having seen, some years since, on a beautiful evening of summer,

  an engagement between two armed ships, from the high Down called the Beacon Hill, near Brighthelmstone.

  SONNET LXXXIV. — line 15.

  Haply may’st thou one sorrowing vigil keep,

  Where Pity and Remembrance bend and weep.

  “Where melancholy friendship bends and weeps.”

  Gray.

  THE DEAD BEGGAR.

  I have been told that I have incurred blame for having used in this short composition, terms that have become obnoxious to certain persons. Such remarks are hardly worth notice; and it is very little my ambition to obtain the suffrage of those who suffer party prejudice to influence their taste; or of those who desire that because they have themselves done it, every one else should be willing to sell their best birth-rights, the liberty of thought, and of expressing thought, for the promise of a mess of pottage.

  It is surely not too much to say, that in a country like ours, where such immense sums are annually raised for the poor, there ought to be some regulation which should prevent any miserable deserted being from perishing through want, as too often happens to such objects as that on whose interment these stanzas were written.

  It is somewhat remarkable that a circumstance exactly similar is the subject of a short poem called

  the Pauper’s Funeral, in a volume lately published by Mr Southey.

  THE FEMALE EXILE.

  This little poem, of which a sketch first appeared in blank verse in a poem called “The Emigrants,” was suggested by the sight of the group it attempts to describe — a French lady and her children. The drawing from which the print is taken I owe to the taste and talents of a lady, whose pencil has bestowed the highest honor this little book can boast.

  OCCASIONAL ADDRESS.

  WRITTEN FOR A PLAYER.

  Line 4.

  The becca-fica seeks Italian groves,

  No more a wheat-ear —

  From an idea that the wheat-ear of the southern Downs is the becca-fica of Italy. I doubt it; but have no books that give me any information on the subject.

  Page 58. line 22.

  A hero now, and now a sans culotte .

  At this time little else was talked of.

  Last line.

  For though he plough the sea when others sleep,

  He draws, like Glendower, spirits from the deep.

  “Glen . I can call spirits from the vasty deep.

  Hotsp . But will they come when you do call for them?”

  Shakespeare.

  The spirits that animate the night voyages of the Sussex fishermen are often sunk in their kegs, on any alarm from the Custom-House officers; and being attached to a buoy, the adventurers go out when the danger of detection is over, and draw them up. A coarse sort of white brandy which they call moonshine , is a principal article of this illegal commerce.

  Page 59. line 16.

  His lisping children hail their sire’s return.

  “No children run to lisp their sire’s return.”

  Gray.

  Line 20.

  And the campaign concludes, perhaps, at Horsham.

  At Horsham is the county jail.

  Line 24.

  And soft, celestial mercy, doubly bless’d.

  — — “It is twice blessed,

  It blesseth him that gives and him that takes.”

  Shakspeare.

  DESCRIPTIVE ODE.

  The singular scenery here attempted to be described, is almost the only part of this rock of stones worth seeing. On a high broken cliff hang the ruins of some very ancien
t building, which the