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

The Salamanca Corpus: The Poetical Works of Miss Susanna Blamire (1842)
Just then Remembrance seem’d to say,
“Why, sure, you wrote but yesterday!
And, scribbling every day such nonsense,
In truth you have but little conscience;
Your scrolls are all so hard to read,
They’re each an Athanasian creed,
Which not a mortal understands,
So quick the line forms in your hands;
And every thought, as you conceive it,
Though immature, you being give it;
Still, still to Wisdom’s full-grown thought
Your small ideas seem a mote,
Therefore on paper no more note them.”
But May and Tibby will out blot them!
Exclaim’d my heart in great emotion,
Stung to the quick at Wisdom’s caution; ‘
’Tis true my heart knows no restraint,
I laugh, or sing, or make complaint;
Just as the heart compounds the dye
The colour flushes to the eye,
And while to Friendship’s ken display’d,
Be ever seen its light and shade.
’Tis Friendship holds the faithful glass
Which lets no faults unnotic’d pass,
[169] .
But places them in such a light
As soften’d meet the conscious sight;
Amendment soon smooths every feature,
And shows a less imperfect creature;
And Friendship’s kind observance shows
Dark Error’s tints or Virtue’s glows.
Happy the few who find the Friend
“Whose candour strives each fault to mend;
Who deals reproof with lenient care,
Touches each fault, yet strives to spare;
For e’en the honest feeling heart
With softest chastisement will smart,—
By conscious defalcation stung,
And pain’d the most t’ have acted wrong;
Then be it Friendship’s constant part
To mend but not afflict the heart.
Thus, with myself in mental confab,