Then Thisbe, half afraid e’en yet, returns,
Lest Pyramus should miss her. Eagerly,
With eyes and heart, she looks for her beloved,
Burning to tell him of the danger past.
But when she gained the place and saw the tree
Sadly discoloured, she was sore in doubt
Whether or no it was the very spot;
Till, all aghast, she saw the blood-stained ground
And quivering limbs, and started, horror-struck,
Trembling as does the sea beneath a breeze.
And when she recognized her dear one’s face,
She threw her tender arms above her head,
And tore her hair, and the dear form embraced,
Filling the wound with tears, and with her lips
Touched the cold face, and called him by his name;
“Pyramus, answer, thine own Thisbe calls!
Oh! hear me, Pyramus, look up once more!”
Touched by the voice, he oped his dying eyes,
Then closed them on the world for evermore.
She now saw all—her veil—the empty sheath.
“Ah! hapless love,” she said, “hath slain my love,
But love will make me strong like him to die,
Fearing no wounds; for I will follow him,
The wretched cause—his comrade, too, in death:
And death that parted us shall re-unite.
O wretched parents of a wretched pair,
Whom true love bound together to the last,
Hear this, my dying voice, and not refuse
To let our ashes mingle in one urn.
O trysting-tree, whose funeral branches shade
The corse of one, and soon shall wave o’er two,
Henceforth forever be our mark of fate,—
Bear in thy fruit the memory of our death!”
She spake these words, and fell upon the sword,
And the point entered deep within her breast.
His blood, yet warm, was mingled with her own.
Her dying prayer the gods in heaven heard,
Her dying prayer touched the lone parents’ hearts,
And both their ashes mingle in one urn.
THE WITHERED LEAF.
(From the French of A. V. Arnault.)
“De ta tige détachée.”
“From thy branchlet torn away,
Whither, whither dost thou stray,
Poor dry leaf?”—“I cannot say.
Late, the tempest struck the oak,
Which was hitherto my stay.
Ever since that fatal stroke,
To the faithless winds a prey,
Not a moment’s rest I gain.
From the forest to the plain,
I am carried by the gale.
Yet I only go the way
That the rose-leaf shuns in vain,
And where laurel-leaves grow pale.”
ANDRÉ CHÉNIER’S DEATH-SONG.
André Chénier, for having dared to write against the excesses of his countrymen, was summoned before the Revolutional Tribunal, condemned and executed, in the year 1794. The first eight stanzas (in the translation) he composed in prison, after his condemnation; the two last he wrote at the foot of the scaffold, while waiting to be dragged to execution. He had just finished the line, “Le sommeil du tombeau pressera ma paupière,” when his turn came, and his words had their fulfillment. In the translation, the spirit, not the letter, has been regarded.
When one lone lamb is bleating in the shambles,
And gleams the ruthless knife,
His yester playmates pause not in their gambols,
Their wild, free joy of life,
To think of him; the little ones that played
With him in sunny hours,
In bright green fields, and his fair form arrayed
With ribbons gay and flowers,
Mark not his absence from the fleecy throng;
Unwept he sheds his blood;
And this sad destiny is mine. Ere long
From this grim solitude