| |
| THOU gray and antique tower, | |
| Receive a wanderer of the lonely night, | |
| Whose moodful sprite | |
| Rejoices at this witching time to brood | |
| Amid thy shattered strength’s dim solitude! | 5 |
| It is a fear-fraught hour,— | |
| A deathlike stillness reigns around, | |
| Save the wood-skirted river’s eerie sound, | |
| And the faint rustling of the trees that shower | |
| Their brown leaves on the stream, | 10 |
| Mournfully gleaming in the moon’s pale beam: | |
| O, I could dwell forever and forever | |
| In such a place as this, with such a night! | |
| When o’er thy waters and thy waving woods | |
| The moonbeams sympathetically quiver, | 15 |
| And no ungentle thing on thee intrudes, | |
| And every voice is dumb, and every object bright! * * * * * | |
| Relique of earlier days, | |
| Yes, dear thou art to me! | |
| And beauteous, marvellously, | 20 |
| The moonlight strays | |
| Where banners glorious floated on thy walls— | |
| Clipping their ivied honors with its thread | |
| Of half-angelic light; | |
| And though o’er thee Time’s wasting dews have shed | 25 |
| Their all-consuming blight, | |
| Maternal moonlight falls | |
| On and around thee full of tenderness, | |
| Yielding thy shattered frame pure love’s divine caress. * * * * * | |
| Light feet have trod | 30 |
| The soft, green, flowering sod | |
| That girdles thy baronial strength, and traced, | |
| All gracefully, the labyrinthine dance; | |
| Young hearts discoursed with many a passionate glance, | |
| While rose and fell the Minstrel’s thrilling strain | 35 |
| (Who, in this iron age, might sing in vain,— | |
| His largesse coarse neglect, and mickle pain!) | |
| Waste are thy chambers tenantless, which long | |
| Echoed the notes of gleeful minstrelsie,— | |
| Notes once the prelude to a tale of wrong, | 40 |
| Of royalty and love. Beneath yon tree, | |
| Now bare and blasted,—so our annals tell,— | |
| The martyr queen, ere that her fortunes knew | |
| A darker shade than cast her favorite yew, | |
| Loved Darnley passing well,— | 45 |
| Loved him with tender woman’s generous love, | |
| And bade farewell awhile to courtly state | |
| And pageantry for yon o’ershadowing grove, | |
| For the lone river’s banks where small birds sing,— | |
| Their little hearts with summer joys elate,— | 50 |
| Where tall broom blossoms, flowers profusely spring; | |
| There he, the most exalted of the land, | |
| Pressed, with the grace of youth, a sovereign’s peerless hand. * * * * * | |
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