| |
| THOUGH the day of my destiny’s over, | |
| And the star of my fate hath declined, | |
| Thy soft heart refused to discover | |
| The faults which so many could find; | |
| Though thy soul with my grief was acquainted, | 5 |
| It shrunk not to share it with me, | |
| And the love which my spirit hath painted | |
| It never hath found but in thee. | |
| |
| Then when nature around me is smiling, | |
| The last smile which answers to mine, | 10 |
| I do not believe it beguiling, | |
| Because it reminds me of thine; | |
| And when winds are at war with the ocean, | |
| As the breasts I believed in with me, | |
| If their billows excite an emotion, | 15 |
| It is that they bear me from thee. | |
| |
| Though the rock of my last hope is shiver’d, | |
| And its fragments are sunk in the wave, | |
| Though I feel that my soul is deliver’d | |
| To pain—it shall not be its slave. | 20 |
| There is many a pang to pursue me: | |
| They may crush, but they shall not contemn: | |
| They may torture, but shall not subdue me; | |
| ’Tis of thee that I think—not of them. | |
| |
| Though human, thou didst not deceive me, | 25 |
| Though woman, thou didst not forsake, | |
| Though loved, thou forborest to grieve me, | |
| Though slander’d, thou never couldst shake; | |
| Though trusted, thou didst not disclaim me, | |
| Though parted, it was not to fly, | 30 |
| Though watchful, ’twas not to defame me, | |
| Nor mute, that the world might belie. | |
| |
| Yet I blame not the world, nor despise it, | |
| Nor the war of the many with one; | |
| If my soul was not fitted to prize it, | 35 |
| ’Twas folly not sooner to shun: | |
| And if dearly that error hath cost me, | |
| And more than I once could foresee, | |
| I have found that, whatever it lost me, | |
| It could not deprive me of thee. | 40 |
| |
| From the wreck of the past, which hath perish’d, | |
| Thus much I at least may recall, | |
| It hath taught me that what I most cherish’d | |
| Deserved to be dearest of all: | |
| In the desert a fountain is springing, | 45 |
| In the wide waste there still is a tree, | |
| And a bird in the solitude singing, | |
| Which speaks to my spirit of thee. July 24, 1816. | |
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