oks
Are fashioned by the channel which they keep)
His words did of their meaning borrow sound,
Her cheek did catch the colour of her words,
I heard and trembled, yet I could but hear;
My heart paused,--my raised eyelids would not fall,
But still I kept my eyes upon the sky.
I seem'd the only part of Time stood still,
And saw the motion of all other things;
While her words, syllable by syllable,
Like water, drop by drop, upon my ear
Fell, and I wish'd, yet wish'd her not to speak,
But she spoke on, for I did name no wish.
What marvel my Camilla told me all
Her maiden dignities of Hope and Love,
'Perchance' she said 'return'd.' Even then the stars
Did tremble in their stations as I gazed;
But she spake on, for I did name no wish,
No wish--no hope. Hope was not wholly dead,
But breathing hard at the approach of Death,
Updrawn in expectation of her change--
Camilla, my Camilla, who was mine
No longer in the dearest use of mine--
The written secrets of her inmost soul
Lay like an open scroll before my view,
And my eyes read, they read aright, her heart
Was Lionel's: it seem'd as tho' a link
Of some light chain within my inmost frame
Was riven in twain: that life I heeded not
Flow'd from me, and the darkness of the grave,
The darkness of the grave and utter night,
Did swallow up my vision: at her feet,
Even the feet of her I loved, I fell,
Smit with exceeding sorrow unto death.

Then had the earth beneath me yawning given
Sign of convulsion; and tho' horrid rifts
Sent up the moaning of unhappy spirits
Imprison'd in her centre, with the heat
Of their infolding element; had the angels,
The watchers at heaven's gate, push'd them apart,
And from the golden threshold had down-roll'd
Their heaviest thunder, I had lain as still,
And blind and motionless as then I lay!
White as quench'd ashes, cold as were the hopes
Of my lorn love! What happy air shall woo
The wither'd leaf fall'n in the woods, or blasted
Upon this bough? a lightning stroke had come
Even from that Heaven in whose light I bloom'd
And taken away the greenness of my life,
The blossom and the fragrance. Who was cursed
But I? who miserable but I? even Misery
Forgot herself in that extreme distress,
And with the overdoing of her part
Did fall away into oblivion.
The night in pity took away my day
Because my grief as yet was newly born,
Of too