Fair fawn-like creature! innocent
In soul as faultless in thy form,—
As o'er the wave thy beauty bent
It blushed thee back each rosy charm.
How soon the senseless wave resign'd
The tints, with thy retiring face,
While glass'd within my mournful mind
Still glows that scene's enchanting grace.
Ah! every scene, or bright or bleak,
Where once thy presence round me shone,
To echoing Memory long shall speak
The Past's sweet legends, Worshipp'd One!
The wild blue hills, the boundless moor,
That, like my lot, stretch'd dark afar,
And o'er its edge, thine emblem pure,
The never-failing evening star.
The lawn on which the Sunset's track
Crimson'd thy home beside the Glen—
The village pathway, leading back
From thee to haunts of hated men—
The walk to watch thy chamber's ray,
'Mid storm and midnight's rushing wings—
These, these were joys, long pass'd away,
To dwell with Grief's eternal things.
My lost Madonna, fair and young!
Before thy slender-sandall'd feet
The dallying wave its silver flung,
Then dash'd far ocean's breast to meet;
And farther, wider, from thy side
Than unreturning streams could rove,
Dark Fate decreed me to divide—
To me, my henceforth buried Love!
Yes! far for ever from thy side,
Madonna, now for ever fair,
To death of Distance I have died,
And all has perished, but—Despair.
Whether thy fate with woe be fraught,
Or Joy's gay rainbow gleams o'er thee,
I've died to all, but the mad thought
That what was once no more shall be.
'Tis well:—at least I shall not know
How time or tears may change that brow;
Thine eyes shall smile, thy cheek shall glow
To me in distant years as now.
And when in holier worlds, where Blame,
And Blight, and Sorrow, have no birth,
Thou'rt mine at last—I'll clasp the same
Unalter'd Angel, loved on earth.
MAN IS A FEATHERLESS BIPED.
I have heard—I saw yesterday that fact enlarged upon in Mrs Thunder's Tales of Passion—that people's hair may be turned gray by intense anxiety, intense fear, intensity of any kind, in a single day. My hair is not exactly gray (far from it, indeed, considering my time of life)—but, if the above physical phenomenon did ever really occur, it ought to be silvery-white. For I have passed through a day, the consequences of which colour, and will colour, my whole existence. Life's fever came to a crisis, and the crisis turned out unfavourably. The threads of my destiny got into a tangle, and Fate in a passion cut the knot with her scissors. My earthly career has been divided into two distinctly-marked portions, and the point where the two are united—the bending-stone (as the Greeks say) of the race-course, is the day on which I was plucked.