Poor girl! she seem’d of an unearthly mould,
A thing superior to the frowns of fate;
But never did my tearful eyes behold
A maid so fair, and so disconsolate;
Yet was she once a child of high estate,
And nurst in splendour, till an envious gloom
Sunk her beneath its harsh o’erpowering weight:
Robb’d her pale features of their orient bloom,
And with a noiseless pace, mov’d onwards to the tomb.
She walk’d upon the earth, as one who knew
The dread mysterious secrets of the grave;
For never o’er her eye of heav’nly blue
Lighten’d a smile; but like the ocean wave
That roars, unblest with sunshine, through the cave
Rear’d in the depths of Snowden, she had flown
To endless grief for refuge; and would rave,
And tell to the night-winds her tale unknown,
Or wander o’er the heath, deserted and alone.
And when the rain beat hard against the hill,
And storms rush’d by upon their wing of pow’r,
Lonely she’d stray beside the bubbling rill,
Or fearless list the deep-voic’d cataract’s roar;
And when the tempest’s wrath was heard no more
She wander’d home, the mountain sod to dress
With many a wreath, and many a summer flow’r:
And thus she liv’d, the sister of distress,
The solitude of love, nurst in the wilderness.
She was the child of nature; earth, sea, sky,
Mountain and cataract, fern-clad hill and dale
Possess’d a nameless charm in her young eye,
Pure and eternal, for in Deva’s vale
Her heart first listen’d to a lover’s tale,
Breath’d by a mountain kerne; and every scene
That wanton’d blithely in the od’rous gale,
Had oft beheld her lord’s enamour’d mien,
As tremblingly she sought each spot where he had been.
But she is gone! The cold earth is her pillow,
And o’er her blooms the summer’s sweetest flow’r;
And o’er her ashes weeps the grateful willow
She lov’d to cherish in a happier hour--
Mute is the voice that breath’d from Deva’s bow’r
Chill is the soul of the neglected rover;
We saw the death-cloud in destruction low’r
O’er her meek head, the western waves roll’d over
The corse of him she lov’d, her own devoted lover.
But oft, when the faint sun is in the west,
And the hush’d gales along the ocean die,
Strange sounds reecho from her place of rest,
And sink into the heart most tenderly--
The bird of evening hour, the humming bee,
And the wild music of the mountain rill,
Seem breathing sorrow as they murmur by,
And whispering to the night, while all is still,
The tale of the poor girl--the “Lady of the Hill.”