The Poetical Works of Miss Susanna Blamire (1842) - Gredos ...

The Salamanca Corpus: The Poetical Works of Miss Susanna Blamire (1842)
ON COLLINS’S ODE ON THE PASSIONS,
AS RECITED BY MRS ESTEN. 1
BENEATH a sad and silent shade.
Afflicted Poetry was laid;
The shepherd train, the virgin choir,
No longer listen d to her lyre;
But, all neglected and alone,
Her feeling and her fire were gone.
No zephyr fondly sued her breast,
No nightingale came there to rest;
The faded visions fled her eyes—
The visions of her ecstasies.
1 Mrs Esten was thought by some to combine in her own person a considerable portion of the dignity of Mrs
Siddons, with the brilliant gaiety of Miss Farren. She is still remembered for her admirable recitation of the
“Ode on the Passions,” and “Alexander’s Feast.”
[126]
And if perchance she sought delight,
It was amid the gloom of night,—
It was the hour the screechowls cry,
Or roaring whirlwinds rend the sky,
To pour her melancholy strain,
And catch a pleasure from the pain.
Esten beheld her haggard air
At twilight as she wander’d there,
And felt the sympathetic woe
That Taste and Feeling ever know;
Then eager sought the city’s throng
To vindicate the force of song.
She chose an ode divinely wild,
Wrote by the Muses’ favourite child;
From Collins was the magic lay,
That subject Passions all obey:
The crowd the varying influence prove
Of Rage, and Hope, and Fear, and Love;
They still implor’d her to rehearse,
And own’d the thrilling power of verse!
O thou, sweet Bard! who now mayst be
A shadow fleeting o’er the sea,
A vapour on the morning rose,