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,
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poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
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