“oh ellen! how delicious was that light
wherein our plighted shadows used to blend,
[pg 311]
meanwhile the melancholy bird of night—
no more of that——the lover’s at an end.
yet if i may advise you, as a friend,
before you next pen sentiments so fond,
study your cycles—i would recommend
our airy—and let south be duly conn’d,
and take a dip, i beg, in the great pond.
“farewell again! it is farewell for ever!
before your lamp of night be lit up thrice,
i shall be sailing, haply, for swan river,
jamaica, or the indian land of rice,
or boothia felix—happy clime of ice!
for trebizond, or distant scanderoon,
ceylon, or java redolent of spice,
or settling, neighbour of the cape baboon,
or roaming o’er—the mountains of the moon!
“what matters where? my world no longer owns
that dear meridian spot from which i dated
degrees of distance, hemispheres, and zones,
a globe all blank and barren and belated.
what matters where my future life be fated?
with lapland hordes, or koords or afric peasant,
a squatter in the western woods located,
what matters where? my bias, at the present,
leans to the country that reveres the crescent!
“farewell! and if for ever, fare thee well!
as wrote another of my fellow-martyrs:
i ask no sexton for his passing-bell,
i do not ask your tear-drops to be starters,
however i may die, transfix’d by tartars,
by cobras poisoned, by constrictors strangled,
by shark or cayman snapt above the garters,
[pg 312]
by royal tiger or cape lion mangled,
or starved to death in the wild woods entangled,
“or tortured slowly at an indian stake,
or smother’d in the sandy hot simoom,
or crush’d in chili by earth’s awful quake,
or baked in lava, a vesuvian tomb,
or dirged by syrens and the billows’ boom
or stiffen’d to a stock mid alpine snows,
or stricken by the plague with sudden doom,
or suck’d by vampyres to a last repose,
or self-destroy’d, impatient of my woes,
“still fare you well, however i may fare,
a fare perchance to the lethean shore,
caught up by rushing whirlwinds in the air,
or dash’d down cataracts with dreadful roar:
nay, this warm heart, once yours unto the core,
this hand you should have claim’d in church or minster
some cannibal may gnaw”—she read no more—
prone on the carpet fell the senseless spinster,
losing herself, as ’twere, in kidderminster!
of course of such a fall the shock was great,
in rush’d the father, panting from the shop,
in rush’d the mother, without cap or tête,
pursued by betty housemaid with her mop;
the cook to change her apron did not stop,
the charwoman next scrambled up the stair,—
all help to lift, to haul, to seat, to prop,
and then they stand and smother round the chair,
exclaiming in a chorus, “give her air!”
one sears her nostrils with a burning feather,
another rams a phial up her nose;
[pg 313]
a third crooks all her finger-joints together,
a fourth rips her up laces and her bows,
while all by turns keep trampling on her toes,
and, when she gasps for breath, they pour in plump
a sudden drench that down her thorax goes,
as if in fetching her—some wits so jump—
she must be fetched with water like a pump!