"Henceforth," sigh'd Arden, "hope, aim, end, confined
To one—my heart, if tortured, is resign'd;
So lately seen, oh! sure she liveth yet!
Once found—oh! strong thine eloquence, Regret!
The palace and the coronal, the gauds
With which our vanity our will defrauds,—
These may not tempt her, but the simple words
'I love thee still,' will touch on surer chords,
And youth rush back with that young melody,
To the lone moonlight and the trysting-tree!"
As the tale ceased, the fields behind them lay,—
The huge town once more open'd on the way;
The whir of wheels, the galliard cavalcade;
The crowd of pleasure, and the roar of trade;
The solemn abbey soaring through the dun
And reeking air, in which sunk slow the sun;
The dusky trees, the sultry flakes of green;
The haunts where Fashion yawns away the spleen;—
Vista on vista widens to reveal
Ease on the wing, and Labour at the wheel!
The friends grew silent in that common roar,
The Real around them, the Ideal o'er;
So the peculiar life of each, the unseen
Core of our being—what we are, have been—
The spirit of our memory and our soul
Sink from the sight, when merged amidst the whole;
Yet atom atom never can absorb,
Each drop moves rounded in its separate orb.
PART THE THIRD.
I.
Lord Arden's tale robb'd Morvale's couch of sleep,
The star still trembled on the troubled deep,
O'er the waste ocean gleam'd its chilling glance,
To make more dark the desolate expanse.
This contrast of a fate, but vex'd by gales
Faint with too full a balm from Rhodian Vales;[O]
This light of life all squander'd upon one
Round whom hearts moved, as planets round a sun,
Mocks the lone doom his barren years endure,
As wasted treasure but insults the poor.
Back on his soul no faithful echoes cast
Those tones which make the music of the past.
No memories hallow, and no dreams restore
Love's lute, far heard from Youth's Hesperian shore;—
The flowers that Arden trampled on the sod,
Still left the odour where the step had trod;
Those flowers, so wasted!—had for him but smiled
One bud,—its breath had perfumed all the wild!
He own'd the moral of the reveller's life,
So Christian warriors own the sin of strife,—
But, oh! how few can lift the soul above
Earth's twin-born rulers,—Fame and Woman's Love!
Just in that time, of all most drear, upon
Fate's barren hill-tops, gleam'd the coming sun;
From nature's face the veil of night withdrawn,
Earth smiled, and Heaven was open'd in the dawn!
How chanced this change?—how chances all below?
What sways the life the moment doth bestow:
An impulse, instinct, look, touch, word, or sigh—
Unlocks the Hades, or reveals the sky.
II.
'Twas eve; Calantha had resumed again
The wonted life, recaptured to its chain;
In the calm chamber, Morvale sat, and eyed
Lucy's lithe shape, that seem'd on air to glide;
Eyed with complacent, not impassion'd, gaze;
So Age looks on, where some fair Childhood plays:
Far as soars Childhood from dim Age's scope,
Beauty to him who links it not with hope!