So each, lest she should speak before
The other, hesitating slow and long
Till the god lost all patience, held her tongue.
He was enraged, in such a
way,
To be kept waiting there all
day,
With two such beauties in the public road;
Scarce able to be civil even,
He wished them both—well,
not in heaven.
Envy at last the silence broke,
And smiling, with malignant
sneer,
Upon her sister dear,
Who stood in expectation
by,
Ever implacable and cruel, spoke
“I would
be blinded of one eye!”
American Keepsake
KING LOUIS XVII.
("En ce temps-la du ciel les portes.")
[Bk. I. v., December, 1822.]
The golden gates were opened wide that day,
All through the unveiled heaven there seemed to play
Out of the Holiest of Holy, light;
And the elect beheld, crowd immortal,
A young soul, led up by young angels bright,
Stand in the starry portal.
A fair child fleeing from the world’s fierce
hate,
In his blue eye the shade of sorrow sate,
His golden hair hung all dishevelled down,
On wasted cheeks that told a mournful story,
And angels twined him with the innocent’s
crown,
The martyr’s palm of glory.
The virgin souls that to the Lamb are near,
Called through the clouds with voices heavenly clear,
God hath prepared a glory for thy brow,
Rest in his arms, and all ye hosts that sing
His praises ever on untired string,
Chant, for a mortal comes among ye now;
Do homage—“’Tis a king.”
And the pale shadow saith to God in heaven:
“I am an orphan and no king at all;
I was a weary prisoner yestereven,
My father’s murderers fed my soul
with gall.
Not me, O Lord, the regal name beseems.
Last night I fell asleep in dungeon drear,
But then I saw my mother in my dreams,
Say, shall I find her here?”
The angels said: “Thy Saviour bids thee
come,
Out of an impure world He calls thee home,
From the mad earth, where horrid murder
waves
Over the broken cross her
impure wings,
And regicides go down among the graves,
Scenting the blood of kings.”
He cries: “Then have I finished my long
life?
Are all its evils over, all its strife,
And will no cruel jailer evermore
Wake me to pain, this blissful vision o’er?
Is it no dream that nothing else remains
Of all my torments but this answered cry,
And have I had, O God, amid my chains,
The happiness to die?
“For none can tell what cause I had to pine,
What pangs, what miseries, each day were mine;
And when I wept there was no mother near
To soothe my cries, and smile away my tear.
Poor victim of a punishment unending,
Torn like a sapling from its mother earth,
So young, I could not tell what crime impending
Had stained me from my birth.
