So she “took the dreary veil.”
They met like a blighted Isabella and Lorenzo:
“They met many a time
In the lone chapels after vesper chime,
They met in love and fear.”
Then, one day,
“He heard it said:
Poor Julio, thy Agathè is dead.”
She died
“Like to a star within the twilight hours
Of morning, and she was not! Some have thought
The Lady Abbess gave her a mad draught.”
Here Mr. Aytoun, with sympathy, writes “Damn her!” (the Lady Abbess, that is) and suggests that thought must be read “thaft.”
Through “the arras of the gloom” (arras is good), the pale breezes are moaning, and Julio is wan as stars unseen for paleness. However, he lifts the tombstone “as it were lightsome as a summer gladness.” “A summer gladness,” remarks Mr. Aytoun, “may possibly weigh about half-an-ounce.” Julio came on a skull, a haggard one, in the grave, and Mr. Aytoun kindly designs a skeleton, ringing a bell, and crying “Dust ho!”
Now go, and give your poems to your friends!