Marcian Colonna :: :: University of Virginia Library

From pain—at length, from pain, (for could he bear
The sorrow burning wild without a tear?)
He rushed beside her: Towards him gloomily
She looked, and then he gasped—“We—list to me—
We—we must part,—must part: is it not so?”
She hung her head and murmured “Woe, oh! woe,
That it must be so—nay, Colonna—nay,
Hearken unto me: little can I say,
But sin—(is it not sin?) doth wear my heart
Away to death. Alas! and must we part,
We who have loved so long and truly?—yes;
Were we not born, (we were,) for wretchedness.
Oh! Marcian, Marcian, I must go: my road
Leads to a distant home, a calm abode,
There I may pine my few sad years away,
And die, and make my peace ere I decay—”

She spoke no more, for now she saw his soul
Rising in tumult, and his eyeballs roll
Wildly and fiery red, and thro' his cheek
Deep crimson shot: he sighed but did not speak.
Keeping a horrid silence there he sate,
A maniac, full of love, and death, and fate.
Again—the star that once his eye shone o'er
Flash'd forth again more fiercely than before:
And thro' his veins the current fever flew
Like lightning, withering all it trembled through
He clenched his hands and rushed away, away,
And looked and laughed upon the opening day,
And mocked the morn with shouts, and wandered wild
For hours, as by some meteor thing beguiled.
He wandered thro' the forests, sad and lone,
His heart all fiery and his senses gone;
Till, at the last, (for nature sank at last,)
The tempest of the fever fell and past,
And he lay down upon the rocks to sleep,
And shrunk into a troubled slumber, deep.
Long was that sleep—long—very long, and strange,

And frenzy suffered then a silent change,
And his heart hardened as the fire withdrew,
Like furnaced iron beneath the winter's dew.