 | Prismatics |  |
HETABEL.
HETABEL.
THERE'S a deep pond hid in you piny cover
That's garlanded with rose-blooms wild and sweet,
Enwreathed with pensile willows, hanging over
Green, bowery nooks, and many a soft retreat
Where Hetabel and I did often meet.
That's garlanded with rose-blooms wild and sweet,
Enwreathed with pensile willows, hanging over
Green, bowery nooks, and many a soft retreat
Where Hetabel and I did often meet.
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There the brown throstle sings, there skims the swallow,
There the blue budded ash its foliage weaves
From deep-struck roots, broidered with sedge and mallow;
Fair lies the pool, beneath its ridgy eaves,
Blotted with waxen pods and ornate leaves.
There workless rests the mill, each withered shingle
Lets through the sun-threads on the knotted floor;
There, where the village hinds were wont to mingle,
Tall weeds upspring; and in the cobwebbed door,
One sees plain written, “they shall come no more!”
There the white cottage stands! shadow'd and sullen,
Its ruined porch with fruitless vines o'erclung;
In beds, and pebbled paths, the vagrant mullen
Tops the rank briers, where once musk roses sprung,
Heart's-ease, and slender spires with blue-bells hung.
There, in that solitude, deserted, lonely,
Closed in a little Eden of our own,
Unvisited, save by the wood birds; only
Ourselves (sweet Hetabel and I) alone,
Our very trysting place unsought, unknown,
Wandered; sometimes beneath the pine's dark shadow,
Sometimes, at evening, when the mill's thick flume
There the blue budded ash its foliage weaves
From deep-struck roots, broidered with sedge and mallow;
Fair lies the pool, beneath its ridgy eaves,
Blotted with waxen pods and ornate leaves.
There workless rests the mill, each withered shingle
Lets through the sun-threads on the knotted floor;
There, where the village hinds were wont to mingle,
Tall weeds upspring; and in the cobwebbed door,
One sees plain written, “they shall come no more!”
There the white cottage stands! shadow'd and sullen,
Its ruined porch with fruitless vines o'erclung;
In beds, and pebbled paths, the vagrant mullen
Tops the rank briers, where once musk roses sprung,
Heart's-ease, and slender spires with blue-bells hung.
There, in that solitude, deserted, lonely,
Closed in a little Eden of our own,
Unvisited, save by the wood birds; only
Ourselves (sweet Hetabel and I) alone,
Our very trysting place unsought, unknown,
Wandered; sometimes beneath the pine's dark shadow,
Sometimes, at evening, when the mill's thick flume
55
Trembled in silver; and the distant meadow
Was half snow white—half hid in sunken gloom,
Even as our own lives—half joy, half doom.
Half joy—half doom! the blissful years are faded,
And the dark, shadowed half is left to me;
By grief, not time, my scattered hairs are braided
With silver threads. And Hetabel? Ah, she
Sleeps by her babe beneath the cypress-tree!
Was half snow white—half hid in sunken gloom,
Even as our own lives—half joy, half doom.
Half joy—half doom! the blissful years are faded,
And the dark, shadowed half is left to me;
By grief, not time, my scattered hairs are braided
With silver threads. And Hetabel? Ah, she
Sleeps by her babe beneath the cypress-tree!
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