1824

II.  Elegy.

  When man had ceased to utter his lament,

  A god then let me tell my tale of sorrow.

What hope of once more meeting is there now
In the still-closed blossoms of this day? 
Both heaven and hell thrown open seest thou;
What wav’ring thoughts within the bosom play
No longer doubt!  Descending from the sky,
She lifts thee in her arms to realms on high.

And thus thou into Paradise wert brought,

As worthy of a pure and endless life;
Nothing was left, no wish, no hope, no thought,

Here was the boundary of thine inmost strife: 
And seeing one so fair, so glorified,
The fount of yearning tears was straightway dried.

No motion stirr’d the day’s revolving wheel,

In their own front the minutes seem’d to go;
The evening kiss, a true and binding seal,

Ne’er changing till the morrow’s sunlight glow. 
The hours resembled sisters as they went. 
Yet each one from another different.

The last hour’s kiss, so sadly sweet, effac’d

A beauteous network of entwining love. 
Now on the threshold pause the feet, now haste.

As though a flaming cherub bade them move;
The unwilling eye the dark road wanders o’er,
Backward it looks, but closed it sees the door.

And now within itself is closed this breast,

As though it ne’er were open, and as though,
Vying with ev’ry star, no moments blest

Had, in its presence, felt a kindling glow;
Sadness, reproach, repentance, weight of care,
Hang heavy on it in the sultry air.

Is not the world still left?  The rocky steeps,

Are they with holy shades no longer crown’d? 
Grows not the harvest ripe?  No longer creeps

The espalier by the stream,—­the copse around? 
Doth not the wondrous arch of heaven still rise,
Now rich in shape, now shapeless to the eyes?

As, seraph-like, from out the dark clouds’ chorus,

With softness woven, graceful, light, and fair,
Resembling Her, in the blue aether o’er us,

A slender figure hovers in the air,—­
Thus didst thou see her joyously advance,
The fairest of the fairest in the dance.

Yet but a moment dost thou boldly dare

To clasp an airy form instead of hers;
Back to thine heart! thou’lt find it better there,

For there in changeful guise her image stirs
What erst was one, to many turneth fast,
In thousand forms, each dearer than the last.

As at the door, on meeting lingerd she,

And step by step my faithful ardour bless’d,
For the last kiss herself entreated me,

And on my lips the last last kiss impress’d,—­
Thus clearly traced, the lov’d one’s form we view,
With flames engraven on a heart so true,—­

A heart that, firm as some embattled tower,