"ST. MARTIN'S SUMMER" represents a lover, with his beloved, striving to
elude the memory of a former attachment, and finding himself cheated by
it. As the fires of a departed summer will glow once more, in the
countenance of the wintry year, so also has his past life projected
itself into the present, assuming its features as a mask. And when the
ghosts, from whom, figuratively, the young pair are hiding, rise from
their moss-grown graves; and the lover would disregard their remonstrant
procession as only "faint march-music in the air": he becomes suddenly
conscious that the past has withdrawn its gifts, and that the mere mask
of love remains to him.

The poem would seem intended to deny that a second love can be genuine:
were not its light tone and fantastic circumstance incompatible with
serious intention.


PROLOGUE TO "LA SAISIAZ," reprinted as "Pisgah-Sights," III., is a
fantastic little vision of the body and the soul, as disengaged from
each other by death: the soul wandering at will through the realms of
air; the body consigned to the

"Ferns of all feather,
Mosses and heather," (vol. xiv. p. 156.)

of its native earth.


_Second Group._