| |
| MOST beautiful, most gentle! Yet how lost | |
| To all that gladdens the fair earth; the eye | |
| That watched her being; the maternal care | |
| That kept and nourished her; and the calm light | |
| That steals from our own thoughts, and softly rests | 5 |
| On youth’s green valleys and smooth-sliding waters. | |
| Alas! few suns of life, and fewer winds, | |
| Had withered or had wasted the fresh rose | |
| That bloomed upon her cheek: but one chill frost | |
| Came in that early autumn, when ripe thought | 10 |
| Is rich and beautiful, and blighted it; | |
| And the fair stalk grew languid day by day, | |
| And drooped—and drooped, and shed its many leaves, | |
| ’T is said that some have died of love; and some, | |
| That once from beauty’s high romance had caught | 15 |
| Love’s passionate feelings and heart-wasting cares, | |
| Have spurned life’s threshold with a desperate foot; | |
| And others have gone mad,—and she was one! | |
| Her lover died at sea; and they had felt | |
| A coldness for each other when they parted, | 20 |
| But love returned again: and to her ear | |
| Came tidings that the ship which bore her lover | |
| Had sullenly gone down at sea, and all were lost. | |
| I saw her in her native vale, when high | |
| The aspiring lark up from the reedy river | 25 |
| Mounted on cheerful pinion; and she sat | |
| Casting smooth pebbles into a clear fountain, | |
| And marking how they sunk; and oft she sighed | |
| For him that perished thus in the vast deep. | |
| She had a sea-shell, that her lover brought | 30 |
| From the far-distant ocean; and she pressed | |
| Its smooth, cold lips unto her ear, and thought | |
| It whispered tidings of the dark blue sea; | |
| And sad, she cried, “The tides are out!—and now | |
| I see his corse upon the stormy beach!” | 35 |
| Around her neck a string of rose-lipped shells, | |
| And coral, and white pearl, was loosely hung; | |
| And close beside her lay a delicate fan, | |
| Made of the halcyon’s blue wing; and when | |
| She looked upon it, it would calm her thoughts | 40 |
| As that bird calms the ocean,—for it gave | |
| Mournful, yet pleasant, memory. Once I marked, | |
| When through the mountain hollows and green woods | |
| That bent beneath its footsteps, the loud wind | |
| Came with a voice as of the restless deep, | 45 |
| She raised her head, and on her pale, cold cheek | |
| A beauty of diviner seeming came; | |
| And then she spread her hands, and smiled, as if | |
| She welcomed a long-absent friend,—and then | |
| Shrunk timorously back again, and wept. | 50 |
| I turned away: a multitude of thoughts, | |
| Mournful and dark, were crowding on my mind; | |
| And as I left that lost and ruined one,— | |
| A living monument that still on earth | |
| There is warm love and deep sincerity,— | 55 |
| She gazed upon the west, where the blue sky | |
| Held, like an ocean, in its wide embrace | |
| Those fairy islands of bright cloud, that lay | |
| So calm and quietly in the thin ether. | |
| And then she pointed where, alone and high, | 60 |
| One little cloud sailed onward, like a lost | |
| And wandering bark, and fainter grew, and fainter, | |
| And soon was swallowed up in the blue depths; | |
| And, when it sunk away, she turned again | |
| With sad despondency and tears to earth. | 65 |
| |
| Three long and weary months—yet not a whisper | |
| Of stern reproach for that cold parting! Then | |
| She sat no longer by her favorite fountain: | |
| She was at rest forever. | |
| |
