THE
BROKEN HEART.
“She
was not beautiful, if bloom
And smiles form beauty—for, like death,
Her brown was ghastly.”
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Those
veering thoughts which toss thy labouring mind,
Lost in its own dark agony, are sad,
And form a pit’ous wreck from what they feed
on,
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In
youth’s short morning. |
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Thine the fate of hearts, tender, kind, possessing |
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All
the warmth that pure, gentlest love inspires,
Till by some stroke ungenerously severe,
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They
fall and languish. [Page 186] |
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Lately I’ve seen thy full buoyancy of soul,
Playful and free, as mountain-sylph or fawn,
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Ere
pain, or anxious care thy thoughts estranged, |
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Or sorrow
found thee. |
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But, alas! the shifting scene has left a trace—
A trace too eloquent of lasting woes,
In which we read misfortune’s dark impression,
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Fixed,
indelible. |
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That cheek, on which youth’s loveliest bloom
has played,
And brow, whose radiance might have fully vied
Still with the most boasted of the eastern fair,
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Have
lost their sweetness. |
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All the winning cheerfulness of thy young heart,
And blushing tints which beauty round thee flung—
Like flow’rs fading away in their sweet odours—
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Fast
yield to decay. [Page 187] |
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And, like the lone hermit, in his dungeon’d
cell*— |
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Where
one bright ray of heav’n’s light ne’er
enters,
Wrapp’d in the solitude of his working thoughts—
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Still
Memory shines, |
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And gives to other days their happiest hue—
Till, at reflection’s call, his heart looks
back,
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And
shows him what he was, is, and soon must be— |
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The
very jest of fate. |
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Thus, in the gloom of thine own imaginings,
Thou pond’rest o’er bright days, and
happy hours,
Gone by, no more to cheer life’s tedious round,
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Or smooth
thy pathway. |
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But—mildest, fairest—for yet thou still
art fair—
Had beauty, and all virtue can bestow,
Been proof ’gainst ev’ry ill, thou hadst
stood unhurt,
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Beneath
life’s pressure! [Page 188] |
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* OVID very properly terms ‘darkness,’
Maximanutrix curarum. [back] |
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