VII. “Once thou wert happy; cheery nights and days Chasing each other o’er a flowery plain, Like fairy lovers; all thy modest ways Fell on fond hearts as falls the summer rain On heat-rived earth, on thirsty fields of grain, And thine the golden harvest of their praise.
VIII. “Half woman grown, half lost in reverie, Love’s marvel came, and I, thine inner life, Was calm and tempest-tossed alternately; For though my fluttering heart with joy was rife, Some premonition of impending strife Flitted betwixt us and futurity.
IX. “The woods our secret knew; their quivering lips Uttered it audibly; the conscious flowers Blushed as we passed them to their throbbing tips, And all the blissful warblers of green bowers Told it each morning to the waking hours;— Old ocean knew it, and the queenly ships.
X. “O dream of dreams, too exquisite to stay! In which I sailed as in a rosy-cloud That floats around the heavens a summer’s day, And when at eve the drowsy woods are bowed, Responsive to the wind that calls aloud, Is rent in fragments and dissolves away.
XI. “So fled my dream when fled the vital spark Of loved Lysander; Oh! his peerless eyes Held all the light that piloted my bark, All the warm sunshine of entrancing skies.— ‘Cold on the battle-field the hero lies,’ So sang the bards, and all the world grew dark!”
XII. At this her tender yearnings, all unplumed, Fluttered and faltered into silent awe, And gasping pause; two gleamy drops illumed Her incorporeal features, and the thaw Of frozen love-throbs, true to mercy’s law, Gave solace, and her heart-tale she resumed.—
XIII. “A foreign despot dared invade our coast, And brave Lysander sped to meet the foe; His was the voice that led the patriot host, And his the arm that laid the tyrant low; Thine own fond lips, Eudora, bade him go, For love of country was thy girlish boast.
XIV. “With triumph crowned our gallant warrior fell! And other suitors sought to win thy hand, And kindred strove to break the evil spell, And deemed that travel in a distant land,— The Orient’s classic vales and mountains grand,— Might calm thy secret sorrow’s turbid swell.
XV. “In vain the Alps arose, in vain we gazed Up the sheer heights where climbed Napoleon’s host, And saw the towering peaks where crashed and blazed The war of storms that pleased Childe Harold most, Where now with Jura sits his gloomy ghost, Above the world he loathed sublimely raised.
XVI. “Nor Como’s lovely lake, nor Arno’s stream, Nor wonders of the Adriatic shore, Nor those immortal cities which redeem From time and death a venerated lore, Whose spell the world confesses evermore, Could shake the winter torpor of our dream.