“And now the bell—the bell
She had so often heard by night and day,
And listen’d to with solemn pleasure,
Almost as a living voice—
Rung its remorseless toll for her,
So young, so beautiful, so good.
“Decrepit age, and vigorous life,
And blooming youth and helpless infancy,
Pour’d forth—on crutches, in the pride of strength
And health, in the full blush
Of promise, the mere dawn of life—
To gather round her tomb. Old men were there,
Whose eyes were dim
And senses failing—
Grandames, who might have died ten years ago,
And still been old—the deaf, the blind, the lame,
The palsied,
The living dead in many shapes and forms,
To see the closing of this early grave.
What was the death it would shut in,
To that which still could crawl and creep above it!
“Along the crowded path they bore her now;
Pure as the new-fall’n snow
That cover’d it; whose day on earth
Had been as fleeting.
Under that porch, where she had sat when Heaven
In mercy brought her to that peaceful spot,
She pass’d again, and the old church
Received her in its quiet shade.”
Throughout the whole of the above, only two unimportant words have been
omitted—_in_ and _its_; and “grandames” has been substituted for
“grandmothers.” All that remains is exactly as in the original, not a
single word transposed, and the punctuation the same to a comma.
Again, take the brief homily that concludes the funeral:
“Oh! it is hard to take to heart
The lesson that such deaths will teach,
But let no man reject it,
For it is one that all must learn,
And is a mighty, universal Truth.
When Death strikes down the innocent and young,
For every fragile form from which he lets
The parting spirit free,
A hundred virtues rise,
In shapes of mercy, charity, and love,
To walk the world and bless it.
Of every tear
That sorrowing mortals shed on such green graves
Some good is born, some gentler nature comes.”
Not a ward of the original is changed in the above quotation, which is
worthy of the best passages in Wordsworth, and thus, meeting on the
common ground of a deeply truthful sentiment, the two most dissimilar men
in the literature of the century are brought into the closest
approximation.
Something of a similar kind of versification in prose may be discovered
in Chapter LXXVII. of “Barnaby Rudge,” and there is an instance of
successive verses in the Third Part of the “Christmas Carol,” beginning
“Far in this den of infamous resort.”