Whether the world too harshly prest
Its iron o'er a yielding breast,
Or forced his morbid youth to prove
The pang of unrequited love,
We know not, for he never said
Aught of the life he erst had led.

On Iris isle, a summer-bower
He twined with branch and vine and flower,
And there he mused on rustic seat,
Unconscious of the noonday heat,
Or 'neath the crystal waters lay,
Luxuriant, in the swimmer's play.

Yet once the whelming flood grew strong.
And bore him like a weed along,
Though with convulsive grasp of pain
And heaving breast, he strove in vain,
Then sinking 'neath the infuriate tide,
Lone, as he lived, the hermit died.

On, by the rushing current swept,
The lifeless corse its voyage kept,
To where, in narrow gorge comprest,
The whirlpool-eddies never rest,
But boil with wild tumultuous sway,
The Maelstrom of Niagara.
And there, within that rocky bound,
In swift gyrations round and round,
Mysterious course it held,
Now springing from the torrent hoarse,
Now battling, as with maniac force,
To mortal strife compelled.

Right fearful, 'neath the moonbeam bright,
It was to see that brow so white,
And mark the ghastly dead
Leap upward from his torture-bed,
As if in passion-gust,
And tossing wild with agony
Resist the omnipotent decree
Of dust to dust.

At length, where smoother waters flow,
Emerging from the abyss below,
The hapless youth they gained, and bore
Sad to his own forsaken door.
There watched his dog, with straining eye,
And scarce would let the train pass by,
Save that with instinct's rushing spell,
Through the changed cheek's empurpled hue,
And stiff and stony form, he knew
The master he had loved so well.
The kitten fair, whose graceful wile
So oft had won his musing smile,
As round his slippered foot she played,
Stretched on his vacant pillow laid.
While strewed around, on board and chair,
The last-plucked flower, the book last read,
The ready pen, the page outspread,
The water cruse, the unbroken bread--
Revealed how sudden was the snare
That swept him to the dead.

And so, he rests in foreign earth,
Who drew 'mid Albion's vales his birth:
Yet let no cynic phrase unkind
Condemn that youth of gentle mind--