| |
| SHE shrank from all, and her silent mood | |
| Made her wish only for solitude: | |
| Her eye sought the ground, as it could not brook, | |
| For innermost shame, on another’s to look; | |
| And the cheerings of comfort fell on her ear | 5 |
| Like deadliest words, that were curses to hear!— | |
| She still was young, and she had been fair; | |
| But weather-stains, hunger, toil, and care, | |
| That frost and fever that wear the heart, | |
| Had made the colors of youth depart | 10 |
| From the sallow cheek, save over it came | |
| The burning flush of the spirit’s shame. | |
| |
| They were sailing over the salt sea-foam, | |
| Far from her country, far from her home; | |
| And all she had left for her friends to keep | 15 |
| Was a name to hide and a memory to weep! | |
| And her future held forth but the felon’s lot,— | |
| To live forsaken, to die forgot! | |
| She could not weep, and she could not pray, | |
| But she wasted and withered from day to day, | 20 |
| Till you might have counted each sunken vein, | |
| When her wrist was prest by the iron chain; | |
| And sometimes I thought her large dark eye | |
| Had the glisten of red insanity. | |
| |
| She called me once to her sleeping-place, | 25 |
| A strange, wild look was upon her face, | |
| Her eye flashed over her cheek so white, | |
| Like a gravestone seen in the pale moonlight, | |
| And she spoke in a low, unearthly tone,— | |
| The sound from mine ear hath never gone!— | 30 |
| “I had last night the loveliest dream: | |
| My own land shone in the summer beam, | |
| I saw the fields of the golden grain, | |
| I heard the reaper’s harvest strain; | |
| There stood on the hills the green pine-tree, | 35 |
| And the thrush and the lark sang merrily. | |
| A long and a weary way I had come; | |
| But I stopped, methought, by mine own sweet home. | |
| I stood by the hearth, and my father sat there, | |
| With pale, thin face, and snow-white hair! | 40 |
| The Bible lay open upon his knee, | |
| But he closed the book to welcome me. | |
| He led me next where my mother lay, | |
| And together we knelt by her grave to pray, | |
| And heard a hymn it was heaven to hear, | 45 |
| For it echoed one to my young days dear. | |
| This dream has waked feelings long, long since fled, | |
| And hopes which I deemed in my heart were dead! | |
| —We have not spoken, but still I have hung | |
| On the Northern accents that dwell on thy tongue. | 50 |
| To me they are music, to me they recall | |
| The things long hidden by Memory’s pall! | |
| Take this long curl of yellow hair, | |
| And give it my father, and tell him my prayer, | |
My dying prayer, was for him.”…
Next day | 55 |
| Upon the deck a coffin lay; | |
| They raised it up, and like a dirge | |
| The heavy gale swept over the surge; | |
| The corpse was cast to the wind and wave,— | |
| The convict has found in the green sea a grave. | 60 |
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