The boy...

The boy

Lifted a sudden look upon his mother,

And in the gleam of forced and hollow joy

Which lightened o'er her face, laughed with the glee

Of light and unsuspecting infancy,

And whispered in her ear,‘ Bring home with you

That sweet strange lady-friend.’ Then off he flew,

But stopped, and beckoned with a meaning smile,

Where the road turned. Pale Rosalind the while,

Hiding her face, stood weeping silently.

In silence then they took the way

Beneath the forest's solitude.

It was a vast and antique wood,

Thro’ which they took their way;

And the gray shades of evening

O'er that green wilderness did fling

Still deeper solitude.

Pursuing still the path that wound

The vast and knotted trees around

Through which slow shades were wandering,

To a deep lawny dell they came,

To a stone seat beside a spring,

O'er which the columned wood did frame

A roofless temple, like the fane

Where, ere new creeds could faith obtain,

Man's early race once knelt beneath

The overhanging deity.

O'er this fair fountain hung the sky,

Now spangled with rare stars. The snake,

The pale snake, that with eager breath

Creeps here his noontide thirst to slake,

Is beaming with many a mingled hue,

Shed from yon dome's eternal blue,

When he floats on that dark and lucid flood

In the light of his own loveliness;

And the birds that in the fountain dip

Their plumes, with fearless fellowship

Above and round him wheel and hover.

The fitful wind is heard to stir

One solitary leaf on high;

The chirping of the grasshopper

Fills every pause. There is emotion

In all that dwells at noontide here;

Then, through the intricate wild wood,

A maze of life and light and motion

Is woven. But there is stillness now:

Gloom, and the trance of Nature now:

The snake is in his cave asleep;

The birds are on the branches dreaming:

Only the shadows creep:

Only the glow-worm is gleaming:

Only the owls and the nightingales

Wake in this dell when daylight fails,

And gray shades gather in the woods:

And the owls have all fled far away

In a merrier glen to hoot and play,

For the moon is veiled and sleeping now.

The accustomed nightingale still broods

On her accustomed bough,

But she is mute; for her false mate

Has fled and left her desolate.

This silent spot tradition old

Had peopled with the spectral dead.

For the roots of the speaker's hair felt cold

And stiff, as with tremulous lips he told

That a hellish shape at midnight led

The ghost of a youth with hoary hair,

And sate on the seat beside him there,

Till a naked child came wandering by,

When the fiend would change to a lady fair!

A fearful tale! The truth was worse:

For here a sister and a brother

Had solemnized a monstrous curse,

Meeting in this fair solitude:

For beneath yon very sky,

Had they resigned to one another

Body and soul. The multitude:

Tracking them to the secret wood,

Tore limb from limb their innocent child,

And stabbed and trampled on its mother;

But the youth, for God's most holy grace,

A priest saved to burn in the market-place.

Duly at evening Helen came

To this lone silent spot,

From the wrecks of a tale of wilder sorrow

So much of sympathy to borrow

As soothed her own dark lot.

Duly each evening from her home,

With her fair child would Helen come

To sit upon that antique seat,

While the hues of day were pale;

And the bright boy beside her feet

Now lay, lifting at intervals

His broad blue eyes on her;

Now, where some sudden impulse calls

Following. He was a gentle boy

And in all gentle sorts took joy;

Oft in a dry leaf for a boat,

With a small feather for a sail,

His fancy on that spring would float,

If some invisible breeze might stir

Its marble calm: and Helen smiled

Through tears of awe on the gay child,

To think that a boy as fair as he,

In years which never more may be,

By that same fount, in that same wood,

The like sweet fancies had pursued;

And that a mother, lost like her,

Had mournfully sate watching him.

Then all the scene was wont to swim

Through the mist of a burning tear.

For many months had Helen known

This scene; and now she thither turned

Her footsteps, not alone.

The friend whose falsehood she had mourned,

Sate with her on that seat of stone.

Silent they sate; for evening,

And the power its glimpses bring

Had, with one awful shadow, quelled

The passion of their grief. They sate

With linked hands, for unrepelled

Had Helen taken Rosalind's.

Like the autumn wind, when it unbinds

The tangled locks of the nightshade's hair,

Which is twined in the sultry summer air

Round the walls of an outworn sepulchre,

Did the voice of Helen, sad and sweet,

And the sound of her heart that ever beat,

As with sighs and words she breathed on her,

Unbind the knots of her friend's despair,

Till her thoughts were free to float and flow;

And from her labouring bosom now,

Like the bursting of a prisoned flame,

The voice of a long pent sorrow came.