Madeline :: :: University of Virginia Library

Now clinging ice-like are those marble arms
To Daphne's neck, while Daphne's bosom warms
Both hearts, and both to sympathy confides:
With twofold grace from death the dying hides.
The bard exults in that benign embrace:
Madeline with peace eternal face to face.
He turns his eyes, obstructed by a tear,
On scenes she shared, a stranger then to fear,
Now such as in a dream the glance retakes
When at a passing thought the past awakes:
Returned from sleep again the pleasance seen,
Yet still the past, the something which has been.
But as in body she is far removed
From him who robbed her, far from scenes she loved,
So her seducer gives to her no thought,
But masked in revels sets her woes at nought.

Through her inured yet more to virgin pain,
He plots the like immaculate to stain;
His riper vows on innocence to thrust:
The purer found, the sweeter to his lust.
So fresh affections dreams he to decoy,
And swell the numbers ever lost to joy!
But now a warning hand is raised to strike,
And Heaven, who governs justly all alike,
Scatters a misty blight that gathers round,
Than lust more deadly, denser than the ground;
A blight that in the east like fog begins,
But is a remnant of man's early sins.
No moon stands half-way towards the seat of war
Unseen the lazulite and inlaid star,
Along the sable-blue no spark betrays
The candid halo of so many rays.
Heaven has retired, mankind to stupefy
Like heaps of wretches buried ere they die.
As if despair had grown within the land
Erect in night the bristled forests stand;
The leafless boughs like arms dart into space,
To feel their way while death comes on apace;
The waters hide their flow, their murmurs hush,
For silence hearkening, conscious of its gush.
A one last light remembered, from that spot
Irradiates the universal blot,

That none may look upon their future home:
The sky dismantled like a cindered dome.
One heavenless depth where souls may laugh or pray:
From God to man a silence all the way.

Illustrious for crime
Through centuries of time,
Its sanctuary the moated castle rears;
But there no memory weeps:
The drudgery of tears
Scorned by the lord who sleeps.
Dreams he a poet's powers
Can rule him in his solitary towers?
Now summoned to atone for sin
Harsh incantations reach him from afar
With threats of war,
Whose harbingers the sullen strife begin.

To those who truly grieve
The world yields some reprieve:
It shares a slumber where all censures end.
To those who ought to weep
Can that same world extend
The liberty of sleep?
Her once fond lord might tell!
As Madeline sank to rest a meteor fell

From tower-embattled skies, and shone
Upon the waters that his home intrenched;
Within them quenched:
Circling the billows in their spreading zone.

Within those towers remote
The drowsy lord it smote;
The shores of sleep uprooting from repose.
As Madeline sank to bliss,
On him the waves arose.
In their retreating hiss
He hears the knell of fate,
And its far echo, woman's dreaded hate.
He listens to the distant chime:
When its last tremor strikes the silent sense
To impotence,
He travels still the desert path of time.

The warning strikes more deep
Poured on him in his sleep.
And as he hears the waves in their rebound,
And feels their surging boom,
He sees the spray surround
The messengers of doom,
Who stand in ranks to wage
On him the menace, wrapped in choral rage.

And as his soul these scenes embroil,
The serpents tangled in the Furies' hair
Desert their lair,
Fall to the couch and round his forehead coil.

A deadly sweat bestrews
His face with icy dews.
Thick as the tears that wet a cavern wall,
And race the dripping rain,
From off his brow they fall;
Swell up and drop again.
Like tendrils of a vine
He feels the reptiles round his conscience twine
And revel in a future state,
The Furies mustered in the circling row,
With looks that glow,
And hearts that riot in the pangs of hate.

Their eyes, that inly brood,
Run down with molten blood,
Whose splash corrodes the armour of his sleep:
Bent over him like age,
Not knowing that they weep,
They empty out their rage.
They curse him by the skies,
They curse him by the towers whereinhe lies.

He trembles at the words of fate,
And draws the hot infection of their breath,
Whose touch brings death
His pride to blight, his house to desolate.

They scatter in his path
The emblems of their wrath.
Aghast, his soul beholds their lurid brands
Point out the exile's way
To lone, untravelled lands
That never look on day.
Nor youth, nor beauty's charm,
Their just intent can soften or disarm.
What they dispose must needs befal;
More drear than the funereal pomp of man
The work they plan:
Lightning their torch and night their sable pall.

They lay the fatal hand,
They set its tightened band
Upon his heart; they barter nod for nod,
And fix, with fingers tall,
The fiat of a god
Against his chamber wall.
The shadow of his doom
He gazes on till twilight spans the room.

Across his heart a hand remains,
Whence hourly grows the superstitious fear
That death is near;
A dread that to the end his soul retains.