What hope or fear or joy is thine? Who talketh with thee, Adeline? For sure thou art not all alone: Do beating hearts of salient springs Keep measure with thine own? Hast thou heard the butterflies What they say betwixt their wings? Or in stillest evenings With what voice the violet woos To his heart the silver dews? Or when little airs arise, How the merry bluebell rings[1] To the mosses underneath? Hast thou look’d upon the breath Of the lilies at sunrise? Wherefore that faint smile of thine, Shadowy, dreaming Adeline? 4 Some honey-converse feeds thy mind, Some spirit of a crimson rose In love with thee forgets to close His curtains, wasting odorous sighs All night long on darkness blind. What aileth thee? whom waitest thou With thy soften’d, shadow’d brow, And those dew-lit eyes of thine,[2] Thou faint smiler, Adeline? 5 Lovest thou the doleful wind When thou gazest at the skies? Doth the low-tongued Orient[3] Wander from the side of[4] the morn, Dripping with Sabæan spice On thy pillow, lowly bent With melodious airs lovelorn, Breathing Light against thy face, While his locks a-dropping[5] twined Round thy neck in subtle ring Make a _carcanet of rays_,[6] And ye talk together still, In the language wherewith Spring Letters cowslips on the hill? Hence that look and smile of thine, Spiritual Adeline. [1] This conceit seems to have been borrowed from Shelley, _Sensitive Plant_, i.:— And the hyacinth, purple and white and blue, Which flung from its bells a sweet peal anew Of music. [2] _Cf._ Collins, _Ode to Pity_, “and _eyes of dewy light_”. [3] What “the low-tongued Orient” may mean I cannot explain. [4] 1830 and all editions till 1853. O’. [5] 1863. A-drooping. [6] A carcanet is a necklace, diminutive from old French “Carcan”. Cf. _Comedy of Errors_, in., i, “To see the making of her Carcanet”. A Character First printed in 1830. The only authoritative light thrown on the person here described is what the present Lord Tennyson gives, who tells us that “the then well-known Cambridge orator S—was partly described”. He was “a very plausible, parliament-like, self-satisfied speaker at the Union Debating Society”. The character reminds us of Wordsworth’s Moralist. See _Poet’s Epitaph_;— One to whose smooth-rubbed soul can cling, Nor form nor feeling, great nor small; A reasoning, self-sufficient thing, An intellectual all in all. Shakespeare’s fop, too (Hotspur’s speech, _Henry IV._, i., i., 2), seems to have suggested a touch or two. With a half-glance upon the sky At night he said, “The wanderings Of this most intricate Universe Teach me the nothingness of things”. Yet could not all creation pierce Beyond the bottom of his eye. He spake of beauty: that the dull Saw no divinity in grass, Life in dead stones, or spirit in air; Then looking as ’twere in a glass, He smooth’d his chin and sleek’d his hair, And said the earth was beautiful.