Vext with lawyers and harass'd with debt:
For how often I caught her with eyes all wet,
Shaking her head at her son and sighing
A world of trouble within!
And Maud too, Maud was moved
To speak of the mother she loved
As one scarce less forlorn,
Dying abroad and it seems apart
From him who had ceased to share her
heart,
And ever mourning over the feud,
The household Fury sprinkled with
blood
By which our houses are torn;
How strange was what she said,
When only Maud and the brother
Hung over her dying bed,-
That Maud's dark father and mine
Had bound us one to the other,
Betrothed us over their wine
On the day when Maud was born;
Seal'd her mine from her first swee.
breath.
Mine, mine by a right, from birth till death,
Mine, mine--our fathers have sworn.
And if ever I should forget
That I owe this debt to you
And for your sweet sake to yours;
O then, what then shall I say?—
If ever I should forget,
May God make me more wretched
Than ever I have been yet!
So now I have sworn to bury
All this dead body of hate,
I feel so free and so clear
By the loss of that dead weight,
A grand political dinner
To half the squirelings near;
And Maud will wear her jewels,
And the bird of prey will hover,
And the titmouse hope to win her
With his chirrup at her ear.
A grand political dinner
To the men of many acres,
A gathering of the Tory,
A dinner and then a dance
For the maids and marriage-makers,
And every eye but mine will glance
That I should grow light-headed, I At Maud in all her glory.
Fantastically merry;
But that her brother comes, like a blight
On my fresh hope, to the Hall tonight.
STRANGE, that I felt so gay,
Strange, that I tried to-day
To beguile her melancholy;
The Sultan, as we name him,
She did not wish to blame him-
But he vext her and perplext her
With his worldly talk and folly:
Was it gentle to reprove her
For stealing out of view
From a little lazy lover
Who but claims her as his due?
Or for chilling his caresses,
By the coldness of her manners,
Nay, the plainness of her dresses ?
Now I know her but in two,
Nor can pronounce upon it
If one should ask me whether
The habit, hat, and feather,
Or the frock and gypsy bonnet
Be the neater and completer;
For nothing can be sweeter
Than maiden Maud in either.
But to-morrow, if we live,
Our ponderous squire will give
She is coming, my own, my sweet;
Were it ever so airy a tread,
My heart would hear her and beat,
Were it earth in an earthy bed;
My dust would hear her and beat,
Had I lain for a century dead;
Would start and tremble under her
feet.
And blossom in purple and red.
THE fault was mine, the fault was mine"
Why am I sitting here so stunn'd and still,
Plucking the harmless wild-flower on the hill?
It is this guilty hand!
And there rises ever a passionate cry From underneath in the darkening land
What is it, that has been done?
O dawn of Eden bright over earth and sky,
The fires of Hell brake out of thy rising sun,
The fires of Hell and of Hate;
For she, sweet soul, had hardly spoken
a word,
When her brother ran in his rage to
the gate,
He came with the babe-faced lord;
Heap'd on her terms of disgrace,
And while she wept, and I strove to be
cool,
He fiercely gave me the lie,
Till I with as fierce an anger spoke, And he struck me, madman, over the face,
Struck me before the languid fool, Who was gaping and grinning by: Struck for himself an evil stroke: Wrought for his house an irredeemable
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