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Key-notes. Bevington, Louisa Sarah (Guggenberger) (1845–1895).

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page:

Key‐Notes

by

L.S. Bevington

London C. Kegan Paul & Co., 1, Paternoster Square
1879

page: v

Dedication.

TO A. W.

To you, first found, when out of empty days
My heart ached youthfully for earnest aim—
For sympathy with hunger of its cry—
For echo of its better discontent—
To you whom quite I reverence and trust,
Aimée, most patient listener, most true friend,
I send some key‐notes of life’s journeying moods
As voice on voice awakened in my soul,
Responsive to fresh visions and new springs.

Touched one by one they scarcely modulate,—
These several strains; no hint connects their tones;
This half effaces that with new intent;
page: vi
And yet the sum of them together cast
Makes just one questioning dissonance, such chord
As symbolises best unfinished life,
Unanswered askings, and unyielded hope;
But tends, prophetic, toward a tarrying close
In chastened minor.
Aimée, you have heard
These songs spring singly from me through the years
Since the fresh mornings when my spirit went
In girlhood’s blindness to its own unsight,
Thoughtful, and little learnèd, up and down
Among its guesses, groping for a truth
Half in heart hunger, half in earnest act
Of young thought‐energy, that needs must win
Its own conviction from what page of life
It opens at; and deems that page the whole.

From then, when truth alone seemed worth my will,
page: vii
Till now, when every truth seems valueless
Save as it fosters in the mood of man
The growth and fruiting of persistent good:—
Fair happiness that ever lifeward tends,
Holding affection social; nor reacts
In any lessened aptitude for joy:—
From then till now, from dawn till more than noon,
So far, still singing, I have found my way.

And there were seasons. First, the frosty chill
That kept the buds asleep, when theories
Bristled, clear out‐lined, in such lucid air
As breathed no breath to melt them into life.
Then wakening spring, when heart first questioned head,
And raindrops split the sunlight into hues.
After, those fiercer noons and lurid nights,
Tense with the testing of all theory;
page: viii
When many a pallid, passionless, plain truth
Philosophy could swear to showed obverse
As bloodless irony ’mong human things.
Later, the autumn mellowness, and fruit
That taught the year the meaning of her life.
And now, at last, a folding of the hands
And waiting of the will while, quietly,
Old loves, old certainties, old sorrows die,
And leave deposit softly in my soul
To enrich the sources of a future spring.

Such parable, my Aimée, gives to you
My clustered key‐notes, and their story too;
And if not quite their meaning, only so
Because no heart may, quite, another know.
Yet take them, dear, and let them tribute be
For the sweet, patient faithfulness you’ve shown to me.

Contents.