University of Virginia Library

Sleep! gracious guardian of the earth,
Who blessest the new nightly birth
Of Nature's kindlier children, bath'd
In darkness, and with silence swath'd;
Hast thou stretch'd Jasper on the sea
Of dreams, and doth that practis'd brain,
Controll'd by fancy and by thee,
Work warpedly with strenuous strain?
Yes—in the mind's mad world is he,
Of shapes and shapeless creatures huge,
Gliding in dreary long array:
He hath at hand no febrifuge
The curst succession to allay.
Onward they come, but do not stay,
Through a gross blackness, murmuring low;
Whirling along in endless row.
Yet, is it endless? No.
Sudden gone; and, ere thought can pass,
He lays down sixty years, and plays
A boy again in fields of grass
Flush of the cowslip; idly strays
Through rutted lanes; sees through the hedge
The serried wheat; and feels once more
Bird-like within, dear privilege
Of youth—on, dream, and ne'er give o'er!
The lark heaves straight up to the sky,
Taking the ear, trancing the eye,
Carrying aloft his melody;
A speck, now seen, now vanish'd—where?
A sound incorporate with air.
Unlabouring memory retrieves
Close wealthy stacks, and farm-house eaves
Behind, and solemn barns, with doors
As wide as Paul's, and threshing-floors,
And the old grey-green church—and home:
And who doth o'er the threshold come?
His father, at a cripple's pace,
With his sun-stricken umber face,
And straight-laid hair of iron grey;
Even as he saw him on the day,
When from his home he fled away;
By whom so long he had been mourn'd,
To whom, ere death, he ne'er return'd,
Whose day of death he never learn'd.
A sight for anguish; but it shifts:
This is but one of memory's gifts;
She hath good store, with which this night,
The sinner's heart she will requite.

Lo! 'tis his marriage morn: his bride,
His other life, sits by his side,
A joy, a comfort, and a pride;
Relinquish'd to his love, and blest
To think her heart by one possest,
Who is her synonyme of best.
Again that sacred feeling fills
His soul, and through his being thrills,
Of tenderness that would secure
The bliss of one so good and pure,
That feeling which would not endure.
And now he sees her, still as good,
A fading form of womanhood;
A casket fill'd with holy grief,
A frost-wrung flower that leaf by leaf
Tends to the ground; a pious shrine,
Wrought by a sinner, yet, divine.
Sees her he had made worthy heaven,
And to the heavenly gate had driven.
Upon her dying bed, and hears
Her parting voice, and sees her tears,
And joins her last, low, lingering prayer—
How!—'tis Uberti he sees there,
Pleading for mercy in such tones
As freeze the marrow in the bones;
Yet own no potency, to work
In him, or his accomplice Kirke,
Who clings about the dying man,
And does what share of death he can.

Horror! o'erlaid by the strong dream,
Old Jasper gasps, but cannot scream:
The past is on; writhe as thou wilt,
Thou can'st not loose the serpent—guilt.

Whence brought, he knows not, but the shade
Of the Italian lean and pale,
Fronts him, and, at a signal bade,
Two phantoms with a gibbering wail,
Float in, and o'er his sense prevail,
That he must swoon and die. Alas!
Philip more gentle than he was,
But, as a disembodied soul,
Or, as a soul which hath seen death,
Forc'd by some horrible control,
To re-assume its house of breath:
And Julia, like some creature wan,
Moon-struck, who slyly doth emerge
Thence, where wild fantasies they fan,
Escap'd the manacles and scourge,
And that unknown incessant man,
Who watches her with sleepless lids:—
Thus seeming, as Uberti bids,
The phantoms float to Jasper's sight;
While, something standing at his right—
He knows that it is clad in white—
In measur'd cadence, dread and drear,
Utters these words into his ear:—
“The last day comes, the final session,
O misery! misery, past expression!
These three even now, even now, prepare
To meet thee, and defeat thee there.
Thou art judg'd, but thou must not despair.
Hope is one element of woe,
In that, to which thou art doom'd to go:
Hope which within shall ever ply,
And fool thee everlastingly.
Behold!”—

And now succeeds a calm;
Then brightness, splendour heavenly bright;
Then a soft, gradual, growing psalm
Goes up, and from the eye-baffling height,
A loud dispersing fugue constrains
Thunder to music: as it wanes,
Thick gloom, which is a fiend, that brings
Its nameless self between its wings,
And clasps him—

Lo! the first faint streak
Of light the morning doth bespeak:
Unconscious of his piercing shriek,
Or how he came there, Jasper kneels
In the next chamber, and appeals
Before a crucifix:—the vision
Hath waken'd dread, but not contrition;
And the strong brain asunder rent,
Hath done its utmost, and is spent:
Dreams cannot make old sin repent.