Whether in convent she abode,
And won to heaven her dreary road,
By blighted and remorseful years

Of scourge, and fast, and sleepless tears;
Or if she fell by bowl or steel,

For that dark love she dared to feel;
Or if, upon the moment smote,
She died by tortures less remote;

Like him she saw upon the block,

With heart that shared the headsman's shock,

In quickened brokenness that came,

In pity, o'er her shattered frame,

None knew—and none can ever know :

But whatsoe'er its end below,

Her life began and closed in woe!

XX.

And Azo found another bride,
And goodly sons grew by his side;
But none so lovely and so brave
As him who withered in the grave;
Or if they were-on his cold eye
Their growth but glanced unheeded by,
Or noticed with a smothered sigh.
But never tear his cheek descended,

And never smile his brow unbended;

And o'er that fair broad brow were wrought

The intersected lines of thought;

Those furrows which the burning.share

Of sorrow ploughs untimely there;

Scars of the lacerating mind

Which the Soul's war doth leave behind.

He was past all mirth or woe:

Nothing more remained below

But sleepless nights and heavy days,
A mind all dead to scorn or praise,
A heart which shunned itself-and yet
That would not yield-nor could forget,
Which when it least appeared to melt,
Intently thought-intensely felt :
The deepest ice which ever froze
Can only o'er the surface close-
The living stream dies quick below,
And flows-and cannot cease to flow.
Still was his sealed-up bosom haunted
By thoughts which Nature hath implanted;
Too deeply rooted thence to vanish,
Howe'er our stifled tears we banish;
When, struggling as they rise to start,
We check those waters of the heart,
They are not dried-those tears unshed
But flow back to the fountain head,
And resting in their spring more pure,
For ever in its depth endure,
Unseen, unwept, but uncongealed,

And cherished most where least revealed.
With inward starts of feeling left,

To throb o'er those of life bereft;
Without the power to fill again
The desart gap which made his pain;
Without the hope to meet them where
United souls shall gladness share,
With all the consciousness that he
Had only passed a just decree;

That they had wrought their doom of ill,
Yet Azo's age was wretched still.
The tainted branches of the tree,

If lopped with care, a strength may give,

By which the rest shall bloom and live
All greenly fresh and wildly free:
But if the lightning, in its wrath,
The waving boughs with fury scathe,
The massy trunk the ruin feels,
And never more a leaf reveals.

NOTES TO PARISINA.

Note 1, page 183, line 14.

As twilight melts beneath the moon away.

:

The lines contained in Section I. were printed as set to music some time since but belonged to the poem where they now appear, the greater part of which was composed prior to «< Lara «< and other compositions since published. Note 2, page 192, line 9.

That should have won as haught a crest.

Haught-haughty-.

Away haught man! thou art insulting me. »

Shakespeare, Richard II.

«The Emperor Nepos was acknowledged by the Senate, « by the Italians, and by the Provincials of Gaul; his moral « virtues, and military talents, were loudly celebrated; and << those who derived any private benefit from his government, <<< announced in prophetic strains the restauration of public felicity.

« By this shameful abdication, he protracted his life a few <«< years, in a very ambiguous state, between an Emperor «< and an Exile, till

Gibbon's Decline and Fall, etc. vol. 6. p. 220.