These breathless words, when a voice deep and dread The Valed Prophet p. 4. London, iublished by Longman Brown, Green & Longmans Paternoster Row "So horrible-oh! never may'st thou see "What there lies hid from all but hell and me! "But I must hence-off, off-I am not thine, "Nor Heav'n's, nor Love's, nor aught that is divine— "Hold me not- -ha! think'st thou the fiends that sever "Hearts, cannot sunder hands?-thus, then-for ever!" With all that strength, which madness lends the weak, She flung away his arm; and, with a shriek, Whose sound, though he should linger out more years Than wretch e'er told, can never leave his earsFlew up through that long avenue of light, Fleetly as some dark, ominous bird of night, Across the sun, and soon was out of sight! LALLA ROOKH could think of nothing all day but the misery of these two young lovers. Her gaiety was gone, and she looked pensively even upon FADLADEEN. She felt, too, without knowing why, a sort of uneasy pleasure in imagining that AZIM must have been just such a youth as FERAMORZ; just as worthy to enjoy all the blessings, without any of the pangs, of that illusive passion, which too often, like the sunny apples of Istkahar*, is all sweetness on one side, and all bitterness on the other. As they passed along a sequestered river after sunset, they saw a young Hindoo girl upon the bank †, whose employment seemed to them so strange, that they stopped their palankeens to observe her. She had lighted a small lamp, filled with oil of cocoa, and placing it in * "In the territory of Istkahar there is a kind of apple, half of which is sweet and half sour."- Ebn Haukal. † For an account of this ceremony, see Grand prés Voyage in the Indian Ocean. |