Too Late

( Dram at is Personæ , 1864.) A man addre ing a dead woman whom he has loved and lost, tells how he feels that she needs help in her grave and finds none; wants warmth from a heart which longs to send it. She married another who did not love her “nor any one else in the world.” This great sorrow was the rock which stopped the even flow of his life current. Some devil must have hurled it into the stream, and so thwarted God, who had made these two souls for each other. Just a thread of water escaped from the obstacle, and that wandered “through the evening country” down to the great sea which absorbs all our life streams. He has hoped at times that some convulsion of nature might roll the stone from its place and let the stream flow undisturbed. But all is past hope now: Edith is dead that should have been his. What should he have done that he omitted? Had he not taken her “No” too readily? Men do more for trifling reasons than he had done for his life’s whole peace. Perhaps he was proud—perhaps helple as a man paralysed by a great blow; anyway, she was gone from his life, and he was desolate henceforth. She was not handsome,—nobody said that. She had features which no artist would select for a model; but she was his life, and even now that she is dead he will be her slave while his soul endures. The poem is full of concentrated emotion, and is the expre ion of a strong man’s life pa ion for a woman’s soul; a pa ion unalloyed by any gro affection; such a love of one soul for another congenial soul as proves that man is more than matter.