When pleasures fann'd youth's infant flower,
And Hope her witcheries round it threw.
That hour is fading; it has fled;
And I am left in darkness now,
A wanderer tow'rds a lowly bed,
The grave, that home of all below.
Young poets often affect a melancholy strain, and none more frequently put on a sad and sentimental mood in verse than those who are as happy as an utter want of feeling for any body but themselves can make them. But in these verses the feeling was sincere and ominous. Miss Davidson recovered from her illness at Albany so far only as to be able to perform the journey back to Plattsburgh, under her poor mother's care. "The hectic flush of her cheek told but too plainly that a fatal disease had fastened upon her constitution, and must ere long inevitably triumph." She however dreaded something worse than death, and while confined to her bed, wrote these unfinished lines, the last that were ever traced by her indefatigable hand, expressing her fear of madness.
There is a something which I dread,
It is a dark, a fearful thing;
It steals along with withering tread.