RAPHAEL.. I SHALL not soon forget that sight: A hazy warmth, a dreamy light, It was a simple print I saw, The fair face of a musing boy; A simple print:- the graceful flow Yet through its sweet and calm repose It was as if before me rose The white veil of a shrine. As if, as Gothland's sage has told, *Suggested by a portrait of Raphael, at the age of fifteen, in the possession of Thomas Tracy, of Newburyport. Was it the lifting of that eye, The narrow room had vanished, space Broad, luminous, remained alone, Through which all hues and shapes of grace And beauty looked or shone. Around the mighty master came The marvels which his pencil wrought, There drooped thy more than mortal face, Oh Mother, beautiful and mild ! Enfolding in one dear embrace Thy Saviour and Thy Child! The rapt brow of the Desert John; And, midst grey prophet forms, and wild There Fornarina's fair young face Slow passed that vision from my view, The truth, that painter, bard, and sage, Even in Earth's cold and changeful clime, Plant for their deathless heritage The fruits and flowers of time. We shape ourselves the joy or fear With sunshine or with shade. The tissue of the Life to be We weave with colors all our own, And in the field of Destiny We reap as we have sown. Still shall the soul around it call The shadows which it gathered here, And painted on the eternal wall Think ye the notes of holy song Oh no! We live our life again : MEMORIALS. LUCY HOOPER." THEY tell me, Lucy, thou art dead That all of thee we loved and cherished, Has with thy summer roses perished: And left, as its young beauty fled, An ashen memory in its stead The twilight of a parted day Whose fading light is cold and vain : Cleave to the pure, the true, and good; *Died at Brooklyn, L. I., on the 1st of 8th mo., 1841, aged 24 years. |