“She left the web, she left the loom, She made three paces thro’ the room, She saw the water-lily bloom, She saw the helmet and the plume, She look’d down to Camelot, Out flew the web and floated wide; The mirror crack’d from side to side; ‘The curse is come upon me,’ cried The Lady of Shalott.”
Here is the mystic note that childhood loves, and here, too, is the sweet constraint of linked rhymes that makes music for its ears. How many of us can remember well our early joy in this poem, which was but as another and more exquisite fairy tale, ranking fitly with Andersen’s “Little Mermaid,” and “Undine,” and all sad stories of unhappy lives! And who shall forget the sombre passion of “Oriana,” of those wailing verses that rang through our little hearts like the shrill sobbing of winter storms, of that strange tragedy that oppressed us more with fear than pity!
“When the long dun wolds are ribb’d with snow, And loud the Norland whirlwinds blow, Oriana, Alone I wander to and fro, Oriana.”
If any one be inclined to think that children must understand poetry in order to appreciate and enjoy it, that one enchanted line,—
“When the long dun wolds are ribb’d with snow,”—
should be sufficient to undeceive him forever. The spell of those finely chosen words lies in the shadowy and half-seen picture they convey,—a picture with indistinct outlines, as of an unknown land, where the desolate spirit wanders moaning in the gloom. The whole poem is inexpressibly alluring to an imaginative child, and its atmosphere of bleak despondency darkens suddenly into horror at the breaking off of the last line from visions of the grave and of peaceful death,—
The same grace of indistinctness, though linked with a gentler mood and with a softer music, makes the lullaby in “The Princess” a lasting delight to children, while the pretty cradle-song in “Sea Dreams,” beginning,—
“What does little birdie say In her nest at peep of day?”
has never won their hearts. Its motive is too apparent, its nursery flavor too pronounced. It has none of the condescension of “Minnie and Winnie,” and grown people can read it with pleasure; but a simple statement of obvious truths, or a simple line of obvious reasoning, however dexterously narrated in prose or verse, has not the art to hold a youthful soul in thrall.