Spirits in grief, lift up your heads, and smile; Lift up your heads, sweet Spirits, heavily, And make a pale light in your cypress glooms, Tinting with silver wan your marble tombs. LVI. Moan hither, all ye syllables of woe, From the deep throat of sad Melpomene ! Among the dead: She withers, like a palm LVII. O leave the palm to wither by itself; Let not quick Winter chill its dying hour!— Her brethren, noted the continual shower LVIII. And, furthermore, her brethren wonder'd much Why she sat drooping by the Basil green, And why it flourish'd, as by magic touch; Greatly they wonder'd what the thing might mean: They could not surely give belief, that such A very nothing would have power to wean Her from her own fair youth, and pleasures gay, And even remembrance of her love's delay. LIX. Therefore they watch'd a time when they might sift This hidden whim; and long they watch'd in vain ; For seldom did she go to chapel-shrift, And seldom felt she any hunger-pain; And when she left, she hurried back, as swift Beside her Basil, weeping through her hair. LX. Yet they contriv'd to steal the Basil-pot, LXI. O Melancholy, turn thine eyes away! O Music, Music, breathe despondingly! O Echo, Echo, on some other day, From isles Lethean, sigh to us-O sigh! Spirits of grief, sing not your "Well-a-way!" For Isabel, sweet Isabel, will die ; • Will die a death too lone and incomplete, Now they have ta'en away her Basil sweet. LXII. Piteous she look'd on dead and senseless things, And with melodious chuckle in the strings Of her lorn voice, she oftentimes would cry 2 After the Pilgrim in his wanderings, To ask him where her Basil was; and why 'Twas hid from her: "For cruel 'tis," said she, "To steal my Basil-pot away from me." LXIII. And so she pin'd, and so she died forlorn, Imploring for her Basil to the last. No heart was there in Florence but did mourn In pity of her love, so overcast. And a sad ditty of this story born From mouth to mouth through all the country pass'd: Still is the burthen sung-“O cruelty, "To steal my Basil-pot away from me!" (LXII) Hunt says "The passage about the tone of her voice,— the poor lost-witted coaxing,-the 'chuckle,' in which she asks after her Pilgrim and her Basil,-is as true and touching an instance of the effect of a happy familiar word, as any in all poetry." It is difficult to imagine that these sentences of Hunt's were not somehow misprinted; but, as the review occurs only in the original issue of The Indicator, one has no means of testing this passage by comparison with later editions. It can hardly be supposed that Hunt really thought the Pilgrim meant Lorenzo; and it ought not to be necessary to explain that the poor lost girl called after any pilgrim whom chance sent her way, enquiring of him where her Basil was. |