The Poet’s First Love.—Playmates.—Miss Mary S. Agnew.—His Fidelity.—Poems Inspired by Affection.—Her Failing Health.—Consumption.—His Return to Her.—The Marriage at the Death-bed.—Her Death.—The Poet’s Grief.—His Inner Life.—The Story in his own Rhyme. We now enter upon the most holy ground ever trod by the biographer,—the sacred recesses of the human heart. In the annals of ordinary life, or even in those of many great men, the record of their early love may not be important to the reader. But to the poet, these more subtle and more tender emotions are events of the greatest importance. Every heart contains more or less of the poetical sentiment, and the love and marriage of any individual is a matter of great moment to him, although it may not be to his biographer. But here we write of a poet. To him, all the strings of human feeling had a clear and unmistakable sound. To him, the undertones of life played an important part in the harmony of his being. All that was pure and sweet in love he saw. All that was beautiful and lovable in life he felt, with a keenness none but the poet can know. Hence to him, we find, as in the history of the grand poets of ancient days, his love was a holy sentiment, to be[134] valued as God’s best gift, and to be worshipped as a part of Him.
In a neighboring farm-house, but a short distance from his father’s farm, lived Mary S. Agnew. She was born and reared in the same community, went to the same school, attended the same church, and was a playmate, classmate, and trusted companion. They sought each other in childhood’s days, and their friendship ripened into love as imperceptibly and surely as the coming and going of the years developed their lives, and pressed them forward into manhood and womanhood. Her dark hair and eyes, her slender form, her lovable disposition, her conscientiousness and purity were presented to him in that strong light, under which all lovers see the merits and virtues of their sweethearts. Added to that was the romance and insight of that other sense which poets are said to possess. He built a shrine to this idol wherever he went, and through all his early years she was, as he said in verse, the representative to him of the goodness of God. On the farm, he made verses in her honor; at the Quaker meeting he was thankful for her; at the parties and social gatherings among the young folks, she was the centre of his thought. Not foolishly or blindly did he exhibit his affection. Not extravagantly or obtrusively did he follow his wooing. But his poetry and his prose give here and there a clew to the deep and fervent love of his youthful days. Some of his very sweetest poetry found its inspiration in[135] that love, and when the volume is published, if ever it is, in which shall appear those sonnets, which have modestly been kept thus far from the public gaze, there will be found gems that the world cannot well spare. How sincere, disinterested, and noble was his affection, was proved by his faithful and unabated love, after he had seen the world and its loveliest ladies, and after the cruel hand of disease had chiselled away the round and rosy cheeks, and left, in place of the sparkling, blushing maiden of his early love, a pallid spectre—a shadow of her former self. In all his wanderings, he never neglected her. In all his most tender writings, her image is more or less clear. In one of his volumes, “The Poet’s Journal,” he gives a history of his love and sorrow; of the awakening, after years of death, in the sweetest and most touching of all his poems.
He allowed some of his earlier verses to see the light of print, wherein he makes mention, indirectly, of Mary S. Agnew. When travelling along the Danube, in 1845, he thus writes:—
“Old playmates! bid me welcome
Amid your brother-band;
Give me the old affection,—
The glowing grasp of hand!
I seek no more the realms of old,—
Here is my Fatherland.
Come hither, gentle maiden,
Who weep’st in tender joy!
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The rapture of thy presence
Repays the world’s annoy,
And calms the wild and ardent heart
Which warms the wandering boy.
In many a mountain fastness,
By many a river’s foam,
And through the gorgeous cities,
’Twas loneliness to roam;
For the sweetest music in my heart
Was the olden songs of home.”
When in Florence, in 1846, he wrote a poem entitled “In Italy,” wherein were the following expressive lines:—
“Rich is the soil with Fancy’s gold;
The stirring memories of old
Rise thronging in my haunted vision,
And wake my spirit’s young ambition.
But as the radiant sunsets close
Above Val d’Arno’s bowers of rose,
My soul forgets the olden glory,
And deems our love a dearer story.
Thy words, in Memory’s ear, outchime
The music of the Tuscan rhyme;
Thou standest here—the gentle-hearted—
Amid the shades of bards departed.
I see before thee fade away
Their garlands of immortal bay,
And turn from Petrarch’s passion-glances
To my own dearer heart-romances.”
“A single thought of thee effaced
The fair Italian dream I chased;
For the true clime of song and sun
Lies in the heart which mine hath won.”
[137]
When he reached London in 1846, after his long pilgrimage, and when so reduced in funds and friends, he yet had the time and mind to write of her these graceful rhymes:—
“I’ve wandered through the golden lands
Where art and beauty blended shine—
Where features limned by painters’ hands
Beam from the canvas made divine,
And many a god in marble stands,
With soul in every breathing line;
And forms the world has treasured long
Within me touched the world of song.”
“Yet brighter than those radiant dreams
Which won renown that never dies—
Where more than mortal beauty beams
In sybil’s lips, and angel’s eyes—
One image, like the moonlight, seems
Between them and my heart to rise,
And in its brighter, dearer ray,
The stars of Genius fade away.”
It is an interesting study and one not altogether unprofitable, to follow, through an author’s works the marks of his peculiar likes, joys, and sorrows. For in science, philosophy, history or poetry, the feelings of the student will unguardedly creep into his manuscripts as if between the lines, and often a little word, or a thoughtlessly inserted sentence or comment, will reveal whole chapters of a life which has been carefully, scrupulously hidden. So in Bayard Taylor’s poetry, written on sea and on land, at home and abroad, in poverty and in affluence, there is a certain[138] vein of originality, and certain references to his own life, which, when placed together, give the clew to his inner life, and reveal a charming domestic scene, which cannot be described in prose. One of his characters in “The Poet’s Journal,” says:—
“Dear Friend, one volume of your life I read
Beneath these vines: you placed it in my hand
And made it mine,—but how the tale has sped
Since then, I know not, or can understand
From this fair ending only. Let me see
The intervening chapters, dark and bright,
In order, as you lived them.”
To which another makes reply in the words below, which so delicately and feelingly refer to his early love, his sorrow at the death of Mary, his first wife, and the brightness of the later affection. To one who has passed through the same trying experience, these lines are marvellously expressive:—
“What haps I met, what struggles, what success
Of fame, or gold, or place, concerns you less,
Dear friend, than how I lost that sorest load
I started with, and came to dwell at last
In the House Beautiful.”
“You, who would write ‘Resurgam’ o’er my dead,
The resurrection of my heart shall know.”
“For pain, that only lives in memory,
Like battle-scars, it is no pain to show.”
Then he goes on to recite a tale so like his own, that it needs scarce any change, but to substitute the names[139] of himself, and those he loved, for the fictitious names we find in the poems. But, before making further quotation, the reader should be made acquainted with the circumstances which prompted those illuminated lines.
While Mr. Taylor was away, Miss Agnew gradually and surely declined in health, until consumption, with all its terrible certainty and serpent-like stealth, made her its victim. It was one of those unaccountable visitations which sometimes come to the young and beautiful in the midst of joy and perfect content. How sadly the news of her sickness fell upon the heart of her lover, and how tenderly and anxiously he prayed and waited for letters from her, which should contain better tidings, he has himself related. Pale and weak, she greeted him on his return from California, with the prediction that she could not live beyond the falling leaves. No skill, no tender nursing, no charm of an abiding love, could stay the hand of death, which, as unseen and secret as the decay in a rose, gradually stole away her color, her beauty, and her life.
He felt that he must lose her; and the whole world, which had before appeared so bright, became dark and chilly. The test showed that while his ambition led him to see the great nations of the earth, to write poems for posterity, and to write his name in italics on the scrolls of fame, there was one solace, one comfort, one desire, which included all the others and made them subservient. He was true to his plighted word.[140] He had become noted and prosperous, while she had remained at the country farm-house in Kennett. He was the associate of Bryant, Greeley, Webster, and Willis; she, the companion of the farmers and Quakers of Chester County. But strong, manly, and honest, his love knew no abatement and his respect felt no check.
It is a touching picture—that simple, solemn marriage in the room of the patient, an almost helpless invalid! He came to redeem his pledge; and in that simple abode, with death standing just outside the door, with a bride scarce able to whisper that she took him for her lawful spouse, he became a husband. The dim, appealing eyes, the tender little flush in her cheek, the tremor of her thin hand, told the joy in her pure heart, but showed also that her happiness would be as brief as it was sincere.
The marriage took place Oct. 24th, 1850, and on the 21st of the following December his wife died. She lingered much longer than her friends expected. At the marriage it was said that she could not live but a very few days. Yet, so soon was it after their union, that the day which is usually the happiest and the day which is usually the gloomiest in a man’s life, came to him within ten weeks of each other. A year after her death, he wrote a poem, “Winter Solstice,” in which he mentions his bereavement:—
“—For when the gray autumnal gale
Came to despoil the dying year,
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Passed with the slow retreating sun,
As day by day some beams depart,
The beauty and the life of one,
Whose love made Summer in my heart.
Day after day, the latest flower,
Her faded being waned away,
More pale and dim with every hour,—
And ceased upon the darkest day!
The warmth and glow that with her died
No light of coming suns shall bring;
The heart its wintry gloom may hide,
But cannot feel a second Spring.
O darkest day of all the year!
In vain thou com’st with balmy skies,
For, blotting out their azure sphere,
The phantoms of my Fate arise:
A blighted life, whose shattered plan
No after fortune can restore;
The perfect lot, designed for Man,
That should be mine, but is no more.”
Still later, he gave expression to his loneliness in that most pathetic of all his writings, “The Phantom.”
“Again I sit within the mansion,
In the old, familiar seat;
And shade and sunshine chase each other
O’er the carpet at my feet.”
“And many kind, remembered faces
Within the doorway come,—
Voices, that wake the sweeter music
Of one that now is dumb.
They sing, in tones as glad as ever,
The songs she loved to hear;
They braid the rose in summer garlands,
Whose flowers to her were dear.
[142]
And still, her footsteps in the passage,
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