Spreading their painted wings, and wantoning,
In life’s glad summer-breeze, from flower to flower;
And, with the fatal spell of one dread glance.
Blasted them all!—how sunk the tender maid,
Then silent to the still and stiffening clasp
Of her dead lover! Echo had not ceas’d
To catch love’s inarticulate ecstasies,
Strain’d in a first embrace—for ever, then,
Fix’d statue-like in Death’s tremendous arms
A hideous contrast! One fell moment still’d