The girl is dressing before the glass, and strives to array herself most becomingly for her expected lover; and he meanwhile is either drowned in the ford, or killed by a fall from his horse—
“O what to her shall be the end?
And what to me remains of good?
To her perpetual maidenhood,
And unto me no second friend.”
These were all as unconscious of disaster as was the Poet, who, “to please him well,” was writing to Hallam in the very hour that he died.
There is a fine passage in Jeremy Taylor’s “Holy Dying,” which contains a like rumination on the uncertainty of life.
“The wild fellow in Petronius that escaped upon a broken table from the furies of a shipwreck, as he was sunning himself upon the rocky shore, espied a man rolled upon his floating bed of waves, ballasted with sand in the folds of his garments, and carried by his civil enemy the sea towards the shore to find a grave; and it cast him into some sad thoughts; that peradventure this man’s wife in some part of the Continent, safe and warm, looks next month for the good man’s return; or it may be his son knows nothing of the tempest; or his father thinks of that affectionate kiss which still is warm upon the good old man’s cheek ever since he took a kind farewell, and he weeps with joy to think how blessed he shall be when his beloved boy returns into the circle of his father’s arms.
“These are the thoughts of mortals, this is the end and sum of all their designs; a dark night and an ill guide, a boisterous sea and a broken cable, an hard rock and a rough wind dashed in pieces the fortune of a whole family, and they that shall weep loudest for the accident, are not yet entered into the storm, and yet have suffered shipwreck.”
VII.
He persists in indulging his melancholy, and so creeps, “like a guilty thing,” at early morning to the door of the house in London where Hallam had lived—Wimpole Street—but this only serves to remind him that
“He is not here; but far away.”
The revival of busy movement on a wet morning in “the long unlovely street,”[8] is vividly described—