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By blighted and remorseful years

Of scourge, and fast, and sleepless tears ;
Or if she fell by bowl or steel,

For that dark love she dared to feel;
Or if, upon the moment smote,
She died by tortures less remote;

Like him she saw upon the block,

With heart that shared the headman's shock,

In quickened brokenness that came,

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But never tear his cheek descended,
And never smile his brow unbended;

And o'er that fair broad brow were wrought

The intersected lines of thought;

Those furrows which the burning share

540

Of Sorrow ploughs untimely there;

Scars of the lacerating mind

Which the Soul's war doth leave behind.

He was past all mirth or woe:

Nothing more remained below,

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But sleepless nights and heavy days,

A mind all dead to scorn or praise,

A heart which shunned itself-and yet
That would not yield-nor could forget,

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Which when it least appeared to melt,

Intently thought-intensely felt:

The deepest ice which ever froze

Can only o'er the surface close

The living stream lies quick below,

And flows and cannot cease to flow.

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Still was his sealed-up bosom haunted

By thoughts which Nature hath implanted;
Too deeply rooted thence to vanish,
Howe'er our stifled tears we banish;

When, struggling as they rise to start,

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We check those waters of the heart,

They are not dried-those tears unshed

But flow back to the fountain head,

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If lopped with care, a strength may give,

By which the rest shall bloom and live

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All greenly fresh and wildly free.

But if the lightning, in its wrath,

The waving boughs with fury scathe,

The massy trunk the ruin feels,

And never more a leaf reveals.

585

H

NOTES.

Note 1, page 63, line 14.

As twilight melts beneath the moon away.

The lines contained in Section I. were printed as set to music some time since: but belonged to the poem where they now appear, the greater part of which was composed prior to "Lara" and other compositions since published.

Note 2, page 75, last line.

That should have won as haught a crest. Haught-haughty-" Away haught man, thou art insulting

me."

THE END.

Shakspeare, Richard II.

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