O’CONNOR’S CHILD.
[This piece was suggested by a picture in the possession of Mrs Lawrence of Wavertree Hall. It represents the “Hero’s Child” of Campbell’s Poem, seated beside a solitary tomb of rock, marked with a cross, in a wild and desert place. A tempest seems gathering in the angry skies above her, but the attitude of the drooping figure expresses the utter carelessness of desolation, and the countenance speaks of entire abstraction from all external objects. A bow and quiver lie beside her, amongst the weeds and wild-flowers of the desert.]
“I fled the home of grief
At Connocht Moran’s tomb to fall,
I found the helmet of my chief,
His bow still hanging on our wall;
And took it down, and vow’d to rove
This desert place a huntress bold;
Nor would I change my buried love
For any heart of living mould.”
Campbell.
The sleep of storms is dark upon the skies,
The weight of omens heavy in the cloud:—
Bid the lorn huntress of the desert rise,
And gird the form whose beauty grief hath bow’d,
And leave the tomb, as tombs are left—alone,
To the star’s vigil, and the wind’s wild moan.
Tell her of revelries in bower and hall,
Where gems are glittering, and bright wine is pour’d;
Where to glad measures chiming footsteps fall,
And soul seems gushing from the harp’s full chord;
And richer flowers amid fair tresses wave,
Than the sad Love-lies-bleeding of the grave.
Oh! little know’st thou of th’ o’ermastering spell
Wherewith love binds the spirit, strong in pain,
To the spot hallow’d by a wild farewell,
A parting agony,—intense, yet vain,
A look—and darkness when its gleam hath flown,
A voice—and silence when its words are gone!
She hears thee not: her full, deep, fervent heart
Is set in her dark eyes;—and they are bound
Unto that cross, that shrine, that world apart,
Where faithful blood hath sanctified the ground;
And love with death striven long by tear and prayer,
And anguish frozen into still despair.
Yet on her spirit hath arisen at last
A light, a joy, of its own wanderings born;
Around her path a vision’s glow is cast,
Back, back her lost one comes in hues of morn![397]
For her the gulf is fill’d—the dark night fled,
Whose mystery parts the living and the dead.
And she can pour forth in such converse high
All her soul’s tide of love, the deep, the strong.
Oh! lonelier far, perchance, thy destiny,
And more forlorn, amidst the world’s gay throng,
Than hers—the queen of that majestic gloom,
The tempest, and the desert, and the tomb!
[397] “A son of light, a lovely form, He comes, and makes her glad.”—Campbell.