While memory bids me weep thee,
Nor thoughts nor words are free,
The grief is fixed too deeply,
That mourns a man like thee.
If we are to judge from the subject of these verses, they are a work
of some care and reflection. Yet they abound in faults. In the line,
Tears fell when thou wert dying;
wert is not English.
Will tears the cold turf steep,
is an exceedingly rough verse. The metonymy involved in
There should a wreath be woven
To tell the world their worth,
is unjust. The quatrain beginning,
And I who woke each morrow,
is ungrammatical in its construction when viewed in connection with
the quatrain which immediately follows. "Weep thee" and "deeply" are
inaccurate rhymes- and the whole of the first quatrain,
Green be the turf, &c.
although beautiful, bears too close a resemblance to the still more
beautiful lines of William Wordsworth,
She dwelt among the untrodden ways
Beside the springs of Dove,
A maid whom there were none to praise
And very few to love.
As a versifier Halleck is by no means equal to his friend, all of
whose poems evince an ear finely attuned to the delicacies of
melody. We seldom meet with more inharmonious lines than those,
generally, of the author of Alnwick Castle.
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