HER DEATH.

CCCXVI.

’Tis a stern and startling thing to think
How often mortality stands on the brink
  Of its grave without any misgiving: 
And yet in this slippery world of strife,
In the stir of human bustle so rife,
There are daily sounds to tell us that Life
  Is dying, and Death is living!

CCCXVII.

Ay, Beauty the Girl, and Love the Boy,
Bright as they are with hope and joy,
  How their souls would sadden instanter,
To remember that one of those wedding bells,
Which ring so merrily through the dells,
    Is the same that knells
    Our last farewells,
  Only broken into a canter!

CCCXVIII.

But breath and blood set doom at nought—­
How little the wretched Countess thought,
  When at night she unloosed her sandal,
That the Fates had woven her burial-cloth,
And that Death, in the shape of a Death’s Head Moth,
  Was fluttering round her candle!

CCCXIX.

As she look’d at her clock of or-molu,
For the hours she had gone so wearily through
  At the end of a day of trial—­
How little she saw in her pride of prime
The dart of Death in the Hand of Time—­
  That hand which moved on the dial!

CCCXX.

As she went with her taper up the stair,
How little her swollen eye was aware
  That the Shadow which followed was double! 
Or when she closed her chamber door,
It was shutting out, and forevermore,
  The world—­and its worldly trouble.

CCCXXI.

Little she dreamt, as she laid aside
Her jewels—­after one glance of pride—­
  They were solemn bequests to Vanity—­
Or when her robes she began to doff,
That she stood so near to the putting off
  Of the flesh that clothes humanity.

CCCXXII.

And when she quench’d the taper’s light,
How little she thought as the smoke took flight,
That her day was done—­and merged in a night
  Of dreams and duration uncertain—­
    Or along with her own,
    That a Hand of Bone
  Was closing mortality’s curtain!

CCCXXIII.

But life is sweet, and mortality blind,
And youth is hopeful, and Fate is kind
  In concealing the day of sorrow;
And enough is the present tense of toil—­
For this world is, to all, a stiffish soil—­
And the mind flies back with a glad recoil
  From the debts not due till to-morrow.

CCCXXIV.