Julia Alpinula :: :: University of Virginia Library

The lamp at midnight hung untrimmed,
The air was hush, the chamber dimmed;
Just then the moon on Julia's face
Shed a mild ray of gloom and grace.
She felt it—half unclosed her eye,
And smiled; it was a blissful thing,
That her beloved Deity,
Should watch her spirit taking wing.
“I come,” she whispered, “where are you,
“My friends? O, draw the darkening veil!
“I go—Elysium swims in view,
“Farewell! a dear, a last farewell!”
And she is gone: a gentle sigh,

Lord Byron, in the stanza already commented on, observes

------“Her heart beneath a claim
“Nearest to heaven's, broke o'er a father's grave.”

Third Canto, stanza 66.

I am not aware of any authority for giving this a literal interpretation. But few writers upon Switzerland have noticed the affecting catastrophe. Briefe uber die Schwitz by Meiner, Berlin, quotes the epitaph, calls Julia a “beautiful young Priestess,” and thinks her death “brought on by excess of grief.” Genave und unstœndliche beschreibung Helvitscher Geschichte, Zuric, by Lauffer, alludes to the circumstance, and says in addition, that she followed her father to the tomb with voiceless grief—the lamentation of silence. Matthisson's Letters to Bonstetten, the friend of Gray, written in German, inform him that “Julia did not long survive the stroke of her father's death, but followed him to the grave in the earilest bloom of life.” He concurs with every one else, as to the touching simplicity of her epitaph.

A quivering of the hand she pressed,
Faint as the kiss of infancy,
Her fluttering spirit fixed in rest.
“Farewell!” O, pure, unsullied truth,
The sage in years, the bloom of youth,
Pain, pity, candour, filial duty,
Undying love, angelic beauty,

And tenderness in toil untired,
In that pathetic word expired!