The Lunatic Girl

Most beautiful, most gentle! Yet how lost To all that gladdens the fair earth; the eye That watched her being; the maternal care That kept and nourished her; and the calm light That steals from our own thoughts, and softly rests On youth's green vallies and smooth-sliding waters. Alas! few suns of life, and fewer winds, Had withered or had wasted the fresh rose That bloomed upon her cheek; but one chill frost Came in that early Autumn, when ripe thought Is rich and beautiful, and blighted it; And the fair stalk grew languid day by day, And drooped -- and drooped, and shed its many leaves. 'Tis said that some have died of love; and some, Love's passionate feelings and heart-wasting cares, have spurned life's threshold with a desperate foot: And others have gone mad,-- and she was one!-- Her lover died at sea; and they had felt A coldness for each other when they parted; But love returned again, and to her ear Came tidings that the ship which bore her lover Had sullenly gone down at sea, and all were lost. I saw her in her native vale, when high The aspiring lark up from the reedy river Mounted, on cheerful pinion; and she sat Casting smooth pebbles into a clear fountain, And marking how they sunk; and oft she sighed For him that perished thus in the vast deep. She had a sea-shell, that her lover brought From the far-distant ocean, and she pressed Its smooth cold lips unto her ear, and thought It whispered tiding of the dark blue sea; And sad, she cried, 'The tides are out!-- and now I see his corse upon the stormy beach!' Around her neck a string of rose-lipped shells, And coral, and white pearl, was loosely hung; And close beside her lay a delicate fan, Made of the halcyon's blue wing; and when She looked upon it, it would calm her thoughts As that bird calms the ocean,-- for it gave Mournful, yet pleasant, memory. Once I marked, When through the mountain hollows and green woods, That bent beneath its footsteps, the loud wind Came with a voice as of the restless deep, She raised her head, and on her pale, cold cheek A beauty of diviner seeming came; And then she spread her hands, and smiled, as if She welcomed a long absent friend,-- and then Shrunk timorously back again, and wept. I turned away a multitude of thoughts, Mournful and dark, were crowding on my mind; And as I left that lost and ruined one,-- A living monument that still on earth There is warm love and deep sincerity,-- She gazed upon the west, where the blue sky Held, like an ccean, in its wide embrace Those fairy islands of bright cloud, that lay So calm and quietly in the thin ether. And then she pointed where, alone and high, One little cloud sailed onward, like a lost And wandering bark, and fainter grew, and fainter, And soon was swallowed up in the blue depths; And, when it sunk away, she turned again With sad despondency and tears to earth. Three long and weary months -- yet not a whisper Of stern reproach for that cold parting! Then She sat no longer by her favorite fountain!-- She was at rest forever.