I was the worm that withered thee....

And he sings of Mary, on her death-bed in her delirium.  He will not believe that she is dying.

  Oh! say not that her vivid dreams
    Are but the shattered glass
  Which but because more broken, gleams
    More brightly in the grass. 
  Her spirit is the unfathomed lake
  Whose face the sudden tempests break
    To one tormented roar;
  But as the wild winds sink in peace
  All those disturbed waves decrease
  Till each far-down reflection is
    As life-like as before.

Her death is not the worst.

  I cannot weep as once I wept
    Over my western beauty’s grave.

* * * * *

  I am speaking of a later stroke,
    A death the dream of yesterday,
  Still thinking of my latest shock,
    A noble friendship torn away. 
  I feel and say that I am cast
    From hope, and peace, and power, and pride

* * * * *

  Without a voice to speak to you
    Save that deep gong which tolled my doom,
  And made my dread iniquity
    Look darker than my deepest gloom.

But the crucial passage (for the sources) is the scene in the yeoman’s hall where Zamorna comes to Percy.  He comes stealthily.

  That step he might have used before
  When stealing on to lady’s bower,
  Forth at the same still twilight hour,
  For the moon now bending mild above
  Showed him a son of war and love. 
  His eye was full of that sinful fire
  Which oft unhallowed passions light. 
  It spoke of quickly kindled ire,
  Of love too warm, and wild, and bright. 
  Bright, but yet sullied, love that could never
  Bring good in rising, leave peace in decline,
  Woe to the gifted, crime to the giver....

* * * * *

  Now from his curled and shining hair,
  Circling the brow of marble fair,
  His dark, keen eyes on Percy gaze
  With stern and yet repenting rays.

* * * * *

He loves Percy whose rose was his, and he hates him, as Heathcliff might have loved and hated, but with less brutality.

  Young savage! how he bends above
  The object of his wrath and love,
  How tenderly his fingers press
  The hand that shrinks from their caress.

The yeoman turns on “the man of sin”.

  What brought you here?  I called you not

* * * * *

  Are you a hawk to follow the prey,
  When mangled it flutters feebly away? 
  A sleuth-hound to track the deer by his blood,
  When wounded he wins to the darkest wood,
  There, if he can, to die alone?

It might have been Heathcliff and a Linton.

So much for Zamorna.

Finally, there are two poems in Mr. Shorter’s collection that, verse for prose, might have come straight out of Wuthering Heights.  One (inspired by Byron) certainly belongs to the Zamorna legend of the Gondal cycle.