So thou hast writ the word, and sign'd thy doom:
Farewell, and pass upon thy gory way,
The direful skein the pausing Fates resume!
Let not the Elysian grove thy steps delay
From thy Promethean goal.
The fatal tree the abhorrent word retain'd,
Till the last Battle on its bloody strand
Flung what were nobler had no life remain'd,—
The crownless front and the disarmèd hand
And the' foil'd Titan Soul;
IX.
Now, year by year, the warrior's iron mark
Crumbles away from the majestic tree,
The indignant life-sap ebbing from the bark
Where the grim death-word to Humanity
Profaned the Lord of Day.
High o'er the pomp of blooms, as greenly still,
Aspires that tree—the Archetype of Fame,
The stem rejects all chronicle of ill;
The bark shrinks back—the tree survives the same—
The record rots away.
Baveno, Oct. 8, 1845.
The Parcæ.——Leaf the Second.
MAZARIN.
FAREWELL TO THE BEAUTIFUL, WITHOUT.
"I was walking, some days after, in the new apartments of his palace. I recognized the approach of the cardinal (Mazaria) by the sound of his slippered feet, which he dragged one after the other, as a man enfeebled by a mortal malady. I concealed myself behind the tapestry, and I heard him say, 'Il faut quitter tout cela!' ('I must leave all that!') He stopped at every step, for he was very feeble, and casting his eyes on each object that attracted him, he sighed forth, as from the bottom of his heart, 'II faut quitter tout cela! What pains have I taken to acquire these things! Can I abandon them without regret? I shall never see them more where I am about to go!'" &c.—Mémoires Inédits de Louis Henri, Comte de Brienne, Barrière's Edition, vol. ii. p. 115.