In forecourt, watchful, if with closed eyes, wait—
Padlocks on Hell’s jaws—Mourning, vengeful Care,
In many aspects; pale Disease and Fear,
Age looking back, Hunger counselling ill,
With Neediness that numbs the nerve of will:—
Forms of terror they all; and, no less dread,
Death, and Sleep, his cousin, sharing one bed;
Labour with a lash, and ill joys that taste
Like honey in the mouth, and lay Mind waste;
While in guard-houses opposite lodge War,
And Carnage driving a funeral car;
The Furies too—each in iron-barred cell—
Police-runners on Earth, hangmen in Hell;
And mad Discord, wreathing her locks of gore
With vipers borrowed from her neighbours’ store.
For centre an old elm, immense in girth,
Keeps sunless, barren, a wide space of earth.
Rumour gives it to idle Dreams, which browze
Upon the leaves, and hang from all the boughs.
Nor far away in the same region dwells
Many a strange freak of whom legend tells;
Centaurs in the doorway, Scylla, fish, maid,
Briareus hundred-headed, arrayed
In flames, Chimæra, and, bellowing beast,
The Hydra, Harpies that pollute a feast,
Gorgons looking cold death, and the Earth-King,
Who grew a fresh third body at each fling.
No stain on Æneas if monsters made
Him grip and wave at the dour crew his blade,
Until warned by the Sibyl that they were
Bodiless Shades, invulnerable as air.
Passing unharmed, they now approached the shore
Where Acheron, Styx, Cocytus meet, and pour,
In one vast whirlpool, mingled filth and sand,
And saw upon the bank old Charon stand.
Squalid ferryman, he keeps watch and ward
Over all these waters and streams; a beard
Shaggy, dirty-white, from his chin flows down;
Frowzy his cloak tied by a knot; a frown
Sits on his brow, o’er eyes twin pools of fire.
The barge, poled, sails to help, is, like the sire,
In iron-rusty age, but crude-green, good
To ship Shades numberless across the flood.
In truth masses rush pell-mell to the bank,
Dead of all sorts, without order, or rank;
Heroes that in their country’s cause had bled,
Aged wives and husbands, boys, girls unwed,
Youths leaving parents to inscribe the stone,
And linger through unwelcome years alone:—
As many as the leaves Autumn’s first frost
Brings down; as winged swarms that have ocean crossed
To escape in warm lands harsh winter’s blasts.
Pitiful the entreaties to be passed
Over. Some Charon takes, rejects the rest—
Perhaps with “sad” heart hid inside that rugged breast!
Well might Æneas wonder at the haste
To reach o’er those waters yon gloomy waste.
“Cocytus this,” the Maid, “that Styx, in whose
Name Gods dare not swear, and then break their vows;
They mark the boundaries of life and death,
Between the world above, the world beneath;
Spirit cannot claim to pass either flood
While it must drag behind it flesh and blood.
A way has been appointed and decreed,
By funeral rites, for it to be freed
From that now mere burden; who lack them pray
The Ferryman in vain; driven away,
They tread a hundred years the same dull track,
Till, less in hope than apathy straying back,
They are—disbodied—afloat! It may be,
If rarely, that friendship, or charity,
Late informed, or remorse for crime, has laid
White bones in earth, and thus a debt repaid.
Æneas heard, believed; for by him stood,
Witnesses to fortune of storm and flood,
And Hell’s hard rules, two whom he recognised
As of Troy’s remnant, but at sea surprised;
By a wild south wind robbed of life and tomb.
Leucaspis, Orontes, they; and in doom
Alike, though companionless, save for woe,
Palinurus!”
Exclaimed Æneas: “So
Diedst?” but Phœbus promised: “None lost at sea,
And all to disembark in Italy?”
“The Oracle spoke truth;” the Pilot said:
“Clinging to the helm, the fourth morn I made
Italy; the while, by the Seas I swear,
I feared not for myself; my only care
Was for thy ship, its steersman lost, and helm,
A prey for waves and gales to overwhelm.
But I landed, began to climb the cliff,
When brute shore-men taking me, soaked and stiff,
And unarmed, for sea-prize, attacked and slew.
Then, stripping my body naked, they threw
Into the sea, by turns there to abide,
And on the beach, at pleasure of the tide.
Oh, by the heaven’s cheerful light and airs,
By thy Sire’s memory, thy hopes and cares
For thy son! to Velia, returning, steer—
My body floats hard-by—give it a bier!
Or why, my Prince, not take a shorter mode
Of lifting my intolerable load?
Whate’er thou wilt, thou canst, with, by thy side,
A Divine Mother for thy shield and guide.
How else could living mortal hope to pass
Such rivers, and the Stygian morass?
Let me cross with thee; all my griefs will cease;
I shall have died at last, and be at peace;”—
“Unburied,” cried the Maid: “without command
From the Furies, presume to tread their strand!
Stop importuning for what Fate denies;
Heaven has not forgotten thy death-cries;
Thy murderers shall avow their foul crime,
And thou be honoured to the end of time;
For I can teach thee more, to ease the ache
Of waiting:—the Cape o’er thy tomb shall take
Thy name; seamen, as, doubling it, they sail,
Shall muse upon thy death, and tell the tale.”
They parted, he to tramp those marshes drear,
Where years are moments, a moment a year.
And living spirits to dead bodies bound
Pace in a tedious circle round and round;
Still, with his pain a joy—“My Cape, my name!”
For Death is ne’er so dead as to be dead to Fame!
Farewell to him. Æneas, with his Guide,
Approached, not unobserved, the black stream’s side
Charon was on the watch as they pursued
Their way along the sad and silent wood.
Scarcely had they emerged when he began
To scold, and Æneas first: “Halt, armed man,
Whoever thou art! No step further! Why
Wouldest thou cross? For ghosts alone I ply
Bound for the realms of slumb’rous Night and Sleep.
Not for live bodies do I ferry keep!
Do I not well remember how I crossed
With Hercules on board, much to my cost?—
Think! Zeus’s son, incomparably strong,
Fastened Cerberus with a leathern thong,
And drew trembling from under Pluto’s throne!
Who paid for the sacrilege? I alone.
When Theseus and Pirithous dared try
To carry off our Queen, who culprit? I!”
“Waste wrath!” quoth the Sibyl: “Thy hound may save
His bark to fright the pale Shades from his cave.
Pluto’s honour is safe; feel no alarms;
’Tis Æneas famed for piety and arms!
Hither has he descended from above
To pay his Sire the homage of his love.
Though not moved thou by tenderness like his,
See the Branch! Render fealty to This!”
At the sight rarely seen the anger sank,
Awe followed; straight backed Charon for the bank,
Clearing bench and deck of many a Shade
To make room for Æneas and the Maid.
Starting with its unwonted weight once more,
The coracle groaned, leaked at every pore;
But lasted out, and at the water’s edge,
Landed in clammy mud and grey-green sedge.
From where against the landing-place he lay,
Cerberus opened his three jaws to bay
Strangers, when the Sibyl, seeing the snakes
Round the neck arching, threw drugged honey-cakes.
The ravening throats licked the whole up; then—
While the monstrous limbs grovelled o’er the den—
Bidding the rivers none re-cross farewell,
The Pair are through the gate, and inside Hell.
The Underworld, an Empire manifold,
Is famed within it two main States to hold;—
For the Damned, and Fiends to torment them, Dis,
The Elysian fields for Saints in bliss.—
But Spirits of the Dead, ere they can come
Before their Judge to be assigned a home
Among the Blest or Sinners, undergo
Two stages of probation; first, we know,
For it to be on due inspection clear
They are qualified as Ghosts; and, next, where
To prepare for trial.—
From graves men rise
Shadows, bodiless, but as Death’s surprise
Caught them; and therefore shadows of the whole,
Of Body with its accidents, and Soul.
Such—Ghosts—they wake on Acheron’s dark shore:
Such by grim Charon are they ferried o’er;
As such they show when rapping at Hell’s gate;
And are sorted in vestibules to wait.
A few mortals, and living, there have been
Who, by the Gods’ leave, in a day have seen
The whole Nether World; but e’en its wide marge,
Reserved for Untried, would take men at large
Their lives to traverse. Reckon! the huge space
Needed to lodge the dead of human race!
Expectants of a summons to be tried
For the lives they led, and the deaths they died!
On probation for abjuring Earth and Sun
When their work above was not fully done!
For being here before it had begun!
Causes peopling this land of Little Ease
Myriad!
body’s accidents, disease,
A wild beast’s claws, a sudden east-wind’s blight;
Riches, poverty; daring and affright;
Jealousies of nations, brothers; the smart
Of love rejected, and a broken heart:
Hope become despair, as past, present schemes
Melt all into the fairy-land of dreams.
The victims—“Legion”—seeming still alive—
Wait here, distributed in Circles five;
Creatures of strange aspect, Earth’s rust inlaid
On spirit bearing it without flesh to aid.
Wanted a world to lodge the whole; and still
Continual accretions, plain, vale, hill,
Forest, are reclaimed from Immensity,
To hold this wreckage of humanity.
The first Circle to which were drawing near
Æneas and his Guide, might force a tear
From hearts of iron; for the entire air
Was but a storm of infantile despair;
One scream—plaints of robbery of the share
In sweet life to which each is born an heir.
Only, clasped to their mother’s breasts, of all
Promised at birth, they have—a funeral!
In the next Circle, less by one degree
Adverse their lot who died through perjury;
For they can claim revision of their cause
By eternal justice, if not man’s laws.
Minos holds his high Court; sifts hearts and lives;
A mute jury through Urns its verdict gives.
Acquittal will not breath of life restore;
But the appellant shuns his fellow Shades no more.
In the third Circle a sad folk abide,
Who go always wondering why they died.
Their hands are wet and red with blood they spilt;
And yet no neighbour charges them with guilt.
Accusers, sternest, themselves keep, within;
“Guilty,” they plead; unpardonable sin.
If a joy, ’tis but to avow their shame;
The story’s essence always is the same:
“Fool I! So wholly hateful did it seem—
Torture to my eyes—slant of a sun beam;
Needs shut it out forthwith—so simply how,
As by sending soul, body straight below?”—
Next moment!
if penury, mean toil were
The price for breathing once more Earth’s free air,
Gladly would all accept Man’s vilest lot,
But Hell’s and Heaven’s laws permit it not.
Slow Acheron is their eternal bound,
With unamiable Styx coiled ninefold around!
A fourth Circle holds within confines wide
“I Campi Dolorosi”; therein hide
In secluded alleys, and myrtle grove,
Those eaten through with leprosy of love.
Death kills it not; for a multitude haunt
The bowers, melancholy music chant.
With Procris, Laodamia, the rest,
The wound, unhealed, still bleeding in her breast,
Tyrian Dido roamed in a great wood.
Æneas in the leafy twilight stood,
Uncertain; as, at the month’s dawn, we doubt
If it be moon, or cloud flitting about.
Soon recognition, love; and, with them both,
Tears, shame, remembrance of his plighted troth:
“Then, ’twas truth,” he cried, “floated o’er the sea—
Dead—and by thy own hand—and, Queen, for Me!
But by the Stars, by all the Gods I know,
By what Pow’rs punish perjuries below—
Against, I swear, my heart’s will, by commands
Divine, I left thy shore for other lands.
To please, not myself, but because I must,
I pace Shadow-land, mouldy with the rust,
Miseries, aches of folly and of crime,—
Accumulated hoardings of old Time.
An instrument I of the Gods’ fixed plan;
Yet even thus would have rebelled as man,
Faced the penalties, had I been so vain
As to imagine the excess of pain
My parting would cause thee!
In pity, stay!
Whom flyest thou? I have so much to say!
And only one poor moment Fate allows!
Rob not of this, the last it grants our vows!”
As fruitless task to seek by words to slake
Fury of a furnace, as to re-make
A broken heart, or back to life surprise
Killed fondness.—On earth she fixed sullen eyes;
Moved by his prayers no more than by a smile
Of Venus would be cliff on Paros’ isle.
At last, though long his sad remorse pursued,
Gathering her strength, she regained the wood.
Their route resumed, they reached a land where air
Had a stir as of life; hither repair
War lords; here the heroes of old fights meet—
Adrastus, Parthenopæus; here greet
Æneas friends from Ilium, whose doom
Himself had witnessed, wept for, at the tomb;
And now re-wept, beholding each a Shade,
Though, like Idæus, in bright armour clad,
And charioteering.
On left and right,
Not with one look content, they throng; delight
To find pretexts to keep him, walk beside;
Question why he came, and how long might bide.
Not so with the Greeks Agamemnon led;
Seeing Æneas’s drawn sword, some fled
As once to their Fleet; all quaked; some would shout,
Mouths gaped, and the cry, a ghost, quavered out.
Shamed at the sight, Æneas, gazing there
As they shrank before him, became aware
Of a Ghost intent upon their dismay—
A Shade continuing the disarray
In which life had fled; hands, nostrils and ears
Lopped off by vengeful, jealous swords and spears;
Lace-work of gashes; the Shade shivered o’er
Dishonouring wounds, and bent, striving sore
To hide them, and himself.—
Hardly, at last
Æneas knew; and, with tears flowing fast,
Forced him to turn:
“Knight, Prince, Deiphobus,
Whose the force, will, to have outraged thee thus?
I had heard, on the death-night of our Town,
On a pile slain thou laid’st thee dying down.
Thy body I found not, but I addressed
Thrice farewell, consigning thy soul to rest.”
“No pious kindness,” answered Priam’s son,
“Friendship could require, hast thou left undone.
To Fate, and the Greek Murderess I owe
Horrors I bore on earth, my shame below;
She made my flesh my tomb, epitaph writ
Thereon, and on my ghost has graven it!
Thou knowest—how forget?—the lying joy
Of the last, the funeral night of Troy.
The Traitress through the festal city led
A chorus of Bacchantes, at its head
Waving a flaming torch; and, with the cry
Of ‘Evan,’ from the Citadel on high,
Summoned her ambushed Argives.—
I meanwhile,
Worn with the day’s cares, unsuspecting guile—
Least of all in my new-made Wife—in sleep,
Unbroken as quiet death’s self, sweet, deep,
Lay in my baleful chamber, whence my Bride
Had stolen all arms, even from my side
My trusty sword.—
Then she invites within
Menelaus—purgation for old sin!
Lo! he, and Ulysses, arch fiend, and She,
With Me unarmed—Why more?—Dost thou not see?
Gods, whom I worshipped, have not I a right
To claim like for like? Will Ye not requite?
But Thou; say, what mischance on sea or land,
Caprice of Fortune, or the Gods’ command,
Has sentenced thee in life to wander here,
Away from sunlight, and glad household cheer?”
A story long to tell; and longer still
Had been, were time Below, for good or ill,
Not measured for guests from the Upper Air
By speed of rosy Dawn’s four horses there.
But for Æneas, with half Day’s course run,
Not yet had the decisive stage begun.
Perforce the Sibyl warned against delay;
Nor thought Deiphobus his friend to stay.
Though bowed by unimaginable ill,
He faded into the Dark, to fulfil
His fate, with Adieu; “a high lot enjoy!
Be glory thine, and found a greater Troy!”
The fifth Circle left, they desired by haste
To pay time lost in grieving for the past.
Where the road forked, they took the right, that led
To Elysium; but, turning his head,
Æneas stood—bewildered, and in awe;
For, backed by a huge range of cliffs, he saw,
Extending far, behind a triple wall,
A city that one might a kingdom call,
Girt by waters—Phlegethon their dread name—
That whirl echoing rocks, and floods of flame.
Then, if that torrent of fire could be crossed,
What of the adamantine gates? Where host
Of men, nay, Gods of high Heaven, with pow’r
To tear those from their storm-defying tow’r?
And, as if this were not enough to keep
Dis safe, Tisiphone, who needs no sleep,
Sits guard in blood-red robe beside the door,
Reckoning each pulsation of the roar,
Every whizz of the lash, moan of pain,
Grating of iron, rattling of the chain.
Æneas heard too; his feet in fear clove
To the ground as frozen; he could not move
From the spot he trod. “What sins punished there,
And how? Whose those hoarse wailings of despair?”
Repelled—attracted: his unuttered thought
She answered:
“Ask not of me to be brought
Within; none guiltless enter but, like me,
They set in charge under Queen Hecate.
Herself, installing me, vouchsafed to tell
The system on which Heaven peoples Hell.
Committals hither are on sentence giv’n
By Rhadamanthus, righteous as Heav’n.
A sinner joys in craft that has concealed
His crime in life; but here it stands revealed
Blazing as the Sun; how vain cunning when
Tisiphone hauls the convict, grieved then
For old triumphs; in her right hand the scourge,
In her left snakes. She screams the while to urge
Her savage pair of sisters to make haste
From banks of dim Cocytus for a feast!
The Trials living men may not attend,
Or the dire chastisements in which they end,
But—for so much is lawful—thou shalt see
The Prison’s threshold.
At a sign from me,
Look! Gates of Adamant have opened wide,
Shrieking in loud protest; on either side,
The Fury, and a Hydra, grisly sight,
That hisses from fifty black jaws its spite;
While Tartarus beyond them plunges down
Full twice the space from red-hot Phlegethon
To the blue vault of Ether.—
Mark the twain,
And thank thy fate for being spared my pain
Of visiting the dungeons they control.
Noting unending torturings of soul!”
“Far from me, were I able, to express
Agonies of the Lost, their hopelessness!
Enough their names who sinned;—
here, hurled to Dis
By lightning at bottom of the abyss
Roll Earth’s sons the Titans; and I saw there
The Aloeid Twins, who scaled upper air,
Piling mount on mount; by brute strength alone
Tried to storm Olympus, and Jove dethrone
Salmoneus too, and the price his pride
Cost him, for choosing impious to ride
Mimicking lightnings’ flash, the thunder’s roar
Fool! to ape Jove with his steeds as they bore
His car through Elis, torches as they cast
Their smoky gleams, trumpets’ quavering blast.
Brief the trickeries of that crazed career,
Joy for man on Earth’s stage to act God’s peer;
And swift climax when, amid storms, there fell
Bolts that drove the pretender down to Hell!
Near him Earth’s nursling, Tityus, I saw,
Stretched o’er nine acres, with, to fill its maw,
A hook-beaked vulture clawing at his breast
For the liver e’er eaten, ne’er at rest;
Since growing ever, putting on new flesh;
So, the Thing gropes for dainties ever fresh.
Myriad Crime’s forms—Dis for all has room.
Kinship that should nurse kindness, rings its doom;
Virtues that have turned strangers into friends,
Oft change brothers and sisters into fiends.
Children, instead of vying to maintain
Parents, have beaten them, and even slain.
A traitor to human nature and hearth
Seduces her who owes to him her birth.
Lawyers, snapping ties sacred as of blood,
Have spun about their clients webs of fraud.
Misers have gone on hatching gold from gold—
A host of them—refusing to withhold
Grains from the hoard, although it were to save
Nearest that should be dearest from the grave.
Guests—till schooled here—have thought theft of a wife
Well worth the risk of forfeiture of life.
Liegemen, loved, aggrandized, have drawn the sword,
Himself had girded on, to stab their Lord.
Statesmen have abused a fond people’s trust,
To sell and tread its freedom in the dust.
Others, having dammed law-making at the source,
Opened, closed locks as gapes or shuts a purse.
The course of life cannot be ruled so straight,
Homes so pure, opportunities so great,
Reasons so full and plain for doing well,
But that they may be used as roads to Hell.
”Penalties”?—
As manifold, various.
The Lapithæ know it, Pirithous,
Tantalus, Ixion. I have held my breath
At black rock threatening, not, welcome Death,
But—for Shadows may feel—mangled, crushed bones,
Dragging eternally over jagged stones.—
That, in act to fall, ever seemed in air.—
And I have seen Hell’s cooks a feast prepare;
Spread couches with purple, and on gold-rests.
Then—dainties in view—as the famished guests
Seated themselves in hungry haste to sup,
The eldest Fury, screaming, started up
From where she lay, and, waving torch alight
Swept banquet, banqueters, into cold night.
On some the doom to push a mass up hill,
And, when it slips, as slip it ever will,
Still push; for some, e’en worse, the Wheel; and then—
Limbs healed—to be broken again, again.
There hapless Theseus sits, and will aye sit;
Phlegyas there, whose cry—might I deaden it!—
Is in mine ears: ‘Men, be warned! Scorn not Heav’n;
Never is sin against the Gods forgiv’n!’”
“More”? Yea; had I a hundred mouths; in each
A tongue of iron to give forth my speech;
And thou weeks to listen, I could not tell
Of all the guilt, its chastisements in Hell.
Enough for thee to know all there have dared
To break God’s laws, and in like kind have fared.
The deeds have been done; and now, fast shut in,
The doers take the wages of their sin.
But time presses; hasten, wouldst thou fulfil
Duties charged by Heaven’s grace, thy own good-will.
Courage; for we have left behind the Pit
Of sin and torture, and are soon to quit
Even the melancholy Precincts, where
The dead still mourn the Past, the Future fear.
Already I see the walls Cyclopian, built
To shut off lands of misery and guilt
From the happier one to which we wend.
Lo the Arch! there must thou thy Branch suspend!”
Crossing the intervening twilight space,
They stood ’neath the vault of the gate in face.
Then, sprinkled with fresh water from a spring,
Æneas hung up his gold offering.
Elysium’s doors opened; he was free,
Having paid her due to its Deity.
ELYSIUM
A land for joyance made; blest for the blest;
Happy in being chosen for their rest;
For nowhere greener lawns, more bow’ry glades
Inviting into more reposeful shades
Of arched romantic groves, with, ev’rywhere,
Steeped in a purple glow, a larger air
Than Earth’s; for the lower world owes no debt
To sun or stars with which our skies are set;
It has them of its own, as real as ours.
Real too its grass, the fragrance of its flow’rs;
Real they to Spirit as to them It seems,
Though for mortals unsubstantial as are dreams.
On turf or yellow sand some test the skill,
That earned them fame in life; and is theirs still.
The woods are full of revellers, who beat
Time to gay dancers and their flying feet;
Or banqueting sit, garlanded with bays,
Singing in chorus legends of old days;
While others proud of battle-fields afar
Conduct a mimic spectacle of war;
Spears waiting to be snatched, and the broad shield
To be slung, chargers harnessed for the field;—
Shadows to terrestrial men, who call
Earthly things real, when shadows most of all;—
Shadows these of the busy lives they led
On earth, which pursue them now they are dead;
Nought palpable, unless that through a grove
Eridanus rolls to the world above.
Here ignorantly happy dwell in joy
Princes like Dardanus who founded Troy;
With Teucer father of a royal race,
Gallant as noble, and most fair of face;
Ilus, Assaracus, of blood divine,
Through whom Æneas proudly traced his line.
Here stood showing glorious wounds a band
Of heroes fall’n to save its native land;
Though other arts could equal entrance gain,—
To give life charm, or steal a pang from pain.
Priests too, who as they at the altar stood
Offered pure lives as well as victims’ blood:
And seers, who ne’er falsified Heav’n’s truth,
But spoke as they heard from Apollo’s mouth:—
A various tribe, yet all alike in this,
That, having served, they have deserved their bliss.
The Maid led where the white-filleted throng
Was thickest; for Musæus’s the song,
Responsive to the lyre’s seven sweet chords,
That vied with all the magic of the words.
High he by head and shoulders o’er the ring
Around. The Sibyl, when he ceased to sing,
Besought him of his courtesy to tell
Where might Anchises in that blest land dwell;
Their search for him had many labours cost;
Dread sights been seen, perilous rivers crossed;
Their grace was brief, they must not longer bide;
How, clogged with flesh, find him without a guide?
Quick answer made the sage: “We count no home
As you on earth; wheresoever we roam
At home are we; for our repose at noon,
Or eve, no couch can equal with its down
A meadow bank, that rills unfailing heap
With flow’rs wooing irresistible sleep.
But flesh and blood aye move the heart and will,
And ye are here their purpose to fulfil;
So, follow me beyond this hanging peak,
And I will point your path to him you seek.”
Under his lead they climbed the height, and thence
Down into a wide, smiling champaign, whence
Opened a wooded valley: in a glade
Anchises stood, and deep in thought surveyed
A host of hurrying Shades. As he gazed,
He heard steps, his Son’s!
Eagerly he raised,
Both hands, while eyes and heart joined in the burst
Of love and joy; each struggling to be first
Its welcome to express: “Dearest! at last
I see Thee; at what cost of perils passed!
Yet never feared I that the utmost pow’rs
Of Earth and Hell could bar a love like ours
From meeting, as in old times, face to face,
In full converse, however brief the space.
With trust undoubting traced I to its goal
Thy devious course; for well I knew thy soul;
Each stage I numbered; tempests on what seas;
Unfriendly lands; kindnesses worse than these!”
“And could’st Thou,” cried Æneas “more repine,
Missing my presence than I longed for thine?
Thy image warned me on the island shore,
To ask thy counsels, as, on earth, of yore,
So, I am here! Once more to feel thy heart
Beating to my own!—
Nay; my Father, why,
When I would clasp hands, kiss thy face, deny
The embrace I dared Hell’s alarms to gain?”
Of no avail his prayers, tears; all vain;
Thrice in his arms the image melted away—
As flutter of breeze; dream at break of day.