I do not need thy breath to cool my death-cold brow;
But go to that far land where she is shining now;
Tell her my latest wish, tell her my dreary doom;
Say that my pangs are past, but hers are yet to come.
And there is Fernando, who stole his love from Zamorna. He is a sort of shadowy forerunner of Edgar Linton.
There is the yeoman Percy, the father of Mary whom Zamorna loved. And there is Zamorna.
A large group of poems in the legend refer, obviously, I think, to the same person. Zamorna is the supreme hero, the Achilles of this northern Iliad. He is the man of sin, the "son of war and love", the child "unblessed of heaven", abandoned by its mother, cradled in the heather and rocked by the winter storm, the doomed child, grown to its doom, like Heathcliff. His story is obscure and broken, but when all the Zamorna poems are sorted from the rest, you make out that, like Heathcliff, he ravished from her home the daughter of his mortal enemy (with the difference that Zamorna loves Mary); and that like Heathcliff he was robbed of the woman that he loved. The passions of Zamorna are the passions of Heathcliff. He dominates a world of savage loves and mortal enmities like the world of Wuthering Heights. There are passages in this saga that reveal the very aspect of the soul of Heathcliff. Here are some of them.
Zamorna, in prison, cries out to his "false friend and treacherous guide":
"If I have sinned; long, long ago
That sin was purified by woe.
I have suffered on through night and day,
I've trod a dark and frightful way."
It is what Heathcliff says to Catherine Earnshaw: "I've fought through a bitter life since I last heard your voice."
And again:
If grief for grief can touch thee,
If answering woe for woe,
If any ruth can melt thee,
Come to me now.
It is the very voice of Heathcliff calling to Cathy.