passion for Rosina kept him there. There is also Douglas of
the "Ride". He appears again in the saga of the Queen Augusta, the woman
of the "brown mountain side". But who he was, and what he was doing, and
whether he killed Augusta or somebody else killed her, I cannot for the
life of me make out. Queen Augusta, like Catherine Earnshaw, is a
creature of passion and jealousy, and her lover had been faithless. She
sings that savage song of defiance and hatred and lamentation: "Light up
thy halls!"
Oh! could I see thy lids weighed down in cheerless woe;
Too full to hide their tears, too stern to overflow;
Oh! could I know thy soul with equal grief was torn,
This fate might be endured--this anguish might be borne.
How gloomy grows the night! 'Tis Gondal's wind that blows;
I shall not tread again the deep glens where it rose,
I feel it on my face----Where, wild blast! dost thou roam?
What do we, wanderer! here, so far away from home?
I do not need thy breath to cool my death-cold brow;
But go to that far land where she is shining now;
Tell her my latest wish, tell her my dreary doom;
Say that my pangs are past, but _hers_ are yet to come.
And there is Fernando, who stole his love from Zamorna. He is a sort of
shadowy forerunner of Edgar Linton.
There is the yeoman Percy, the father of Mary whom Zamorna loved. And
there is Zamorna.
A large group of poems in the legend refer, obviously, I think, to the
same person. Zamorna is the supreme hero, the Achilles of this northern
Iliad. He is the man of sin, the "son of war and love", the child
"unblessed of heaven", abandoned by its mother, cradled in the heather
and rocked by the winter storm, the doomed child, grown to its doom,
like Heathcliff. His story is obscure and broken, but when all the
Zamorna poems are sorted from the rest, you make out that, like
Heathcliff, he ravished from her home the daughter of his mortal enemy
(with the difference that Zamorna loves Mary); and that like Heathcliff
he was robbed of the woman that he loved. The passions of Zamorna are
the passions of Heathcliff. He dominates a world of savage loves and
mortal enmities like the world of _Wuthering Heights_. There are
passages in this saga that reveal the very aspect of the soul of
Heathcliff. Here are some of them.
Zamorna, in prison, cries out to his "false friend and treacherous
guide":
"If I have sinned; long, long ago
That sin was purified by woe.
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