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| THESE dreary hours of hopeless gloom | |
| Are all of life I fain would know; | |
| I would but feel my life consume, | |
| While bring they back mine ancient woe; | |
| For, midst the clouds of grief and shame | 5 |
| That crowd around, one face I see; | |
| It is the face I dare not name, | |
| The face none ever name to me. | |
| |
| I saw it first when in the dance | |
| Borne, like a falcon, down the hall, | 10 |
| He stay’d to cure some rude mischance | |
| My girlish deeds had caused to fall; | |
| He smil’d, he danced with me, he made | |
| A thousand ways to soothe my pain; | |
| And sleeplessly all night I pray’d | 15 |
| That I might see that smile again. | |
| |
| I saw it next, a thousand times; | |
| And every time its kind smile near’d; | |
| Oh! twice ten thousand glorious chimes | |
| My heart rang out, when he appear’d; | 20 |
| What was I then, that others’ thought | |
| Could alter so my thought of him; | |
| That I could be by others taught | |
| His image from my heart to dim! | |
| |
| I saw it last, when black and white | 25 |
| Shadows went struggling o’er it wild; | |
| When he regain’d my long-lost sight, | |
| And I with cold obeisance smil’d;— | |
| I did not see it fade from life; | |
| My letters o’er his heart they found; | 30 |
| They told me in death’s last hard strife | |
| His dying hands around them wound. | |
| |
| Although my scorn that face did maim, | |
| Even when its love would not depart; | |
| Although my laughter smote its shame | 35 |
| And drave it swording through his heart; | |
| Although its death-gloom grasps my brain | |
| With crushing unrefus’d despair; | |
| That I may dream that face again | |
| God still must find alone my prayer. | 40 |
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