She left her own warm home
To tempt the frozen waste,
What time the traveller fear'd to roam,
And hunter shunn'd the blast,
Love pour'd his strength into her soul--
Could peril e'er his power controul!
She left her own warm home.
When stone, and herb, and tree,
And all beneath heaven's lurid dome
By wintry majesty,
In his stern age, were clad with snow,
And human hearts beat chill and slow.
It was a fearful hour
For one so young and fair:
The woods had not one sheltering bower,
The earth was trackless there,
The very boughs in silver slept,
As the sea-foam had o'er them swept.
Snow after snow came down,
The sky look'd fix'd in ice;
She deem'd amid the season's power,
Her love would all suffice
To keep the source of being warm,
And mock the terrors of the storm.
Love was her world of life.
She thought but of her heart,
And knowing that the winter's strife
Could not its hope dispart,
She dream'd not that its home of clay
Might yield before the tempest's sway--
Or judged that passion's power--
Passion so strong and pure.
Might mock the snow-flake's wildering shower,
Proud that it could endure,
As woman oft in times before
Had peril borne as much or more.
She went--dawn past o'er dawn,
None saw her face again,
The eyes she should have gazed upon,
Look'd for her face in vain--
The ear to which her voice was song,
Her voice had sought--how vainly long!
There is in Saco's vale
A gently swelling hill,
Shadows have wrapt it like a veil
From trees that mark it still,
Around, the mountains towering blue
Look on that spot of saddest hue.
'Twas by that little hill,
At the dark noon of night,
Close by a frozen snow-hid rill,
Where branches close unite
Even in winter's leafless time,
The skeletons of summer's prime.
That flash'd the traveller's flame
On tree and precipice,
And show'd a fair unearthly frame
In robes of glittering ice,
With head against a trunk inclined,
Like a dream-spirit of the mind.
'Twas that love-wander'd maid, death-pale,
Her very heart's blood froze,
Love's Niobe, in her own vale,
Now reckless of all woes--
Love's victim fair, and true, find meet,
As she of the famed Paraclete.
The mountains round shall tell
Her tale to travellers long.
The little vale of Saco swell
The western poet's song,
And "Nancy's Hill" in loftier rhymes
Be sung through unborn realms and times.
_New Monthly Magazine_.
[7] A few miles below the Notch of the White Mountains in the
Valley of Saco, is a little rise of land called "Nancy's Hill."
It was formerly thickly covered with trees, a cluster of which
remains to mark the spot. In 1773, at Dartmouth, Jefferson co.
U.S. lived Nancy----, of respectable connexions. She was
engaged to be married. Her lover had set out for Lancaster. She
would follow him in the depth of winter, and on foot. There was
not a house for thirty miles, and the way through the wild
woods a footpath only. She persisted in her design, and
wrapping herself in her long cloak, proceeded on her way. Snow
and frost took place for several weeks, when some persons
passing her route, reached the lull at night. On lighting their
fires, an unearthly figure stood before them beneath the
bending branches, wrapped in a robe of ice. It was the lifeless
form of Nancy.
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