Key-notes.
Bevington, L. S. (Louisa Sarah), 1845–1895.
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;
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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,
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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;
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- 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.
