XIV. Loook thou theer wheer Wrigglesby beck comes out by the 'ill! Feyther run up to the farm, an' I runs up to the mill; An' I'll run up to the brig, an' that thou'll live to see; And if thou marries a good un I'll leave the land to thee. XV. Thim's my noätions, Sammy, wheerby I means to stick; But if thou marries a bad un, I'll leave the land to Dick. Coom oop, proputty, proputty-that's what I 'ears 'im snäy Proputty, proputty, proputty- canter an' canter awany. THE GOLDEN SUPPER. [This poom is founded upon a story in Boccaccio. A young lover, Julian, whose cousin and foster-sistor, Camilla, has been wedded to his friend and rival, Lionel, endeavours to narrate the story of his own love for her, and the strange sequel of it. He speaks of having been haunted in delirium by visions and the sound of bolls, sometimes tolling for a funeral, and at last ringing for a marriage; but he breaks away, overcome, as ho approaches the Evont, and a witness to it completes the tale.] * HE flies the event: he leaves the event to me: Poor Julian-how he rush'd away; the bells, Those marriage bells, echoing in ear and heart But cast a parting glance at me, you saw, One golden hour-of triumph shall I say? Solace at least-before he left his home. Would you had seen him in that hour of his ! He moved thro' all of it majestically Restrain'd himself quite to the close-but now Whether they were his lady's marriage-bells, Or prophets of them in his fantasy, I never ask'd: but Lionel and the girl Were wedded, and our Julian came again Back to his mother's house among the pines. But there, their gloom, the mountains and the Bay, The whole land weigh'd him down as Etna does The Giant of Mythology: he would go, Would leave the land for ever, and had gone Surely, but for a whisper 'Go not yet,' Some warning, and divinely as it seem'd As of the visions that he told the event And partly made them-tho' he knew it not. And thus he stay'd and would not look at her No not for months: but, when the eleventh moon After their marriage lit the lover's Bay, Heard yet once more the tolling bell, and said, Would you could toll me out of life, but found All softly as his mother broke it to him A crueller reason than a crazy ear, For that low knell tolling his lady dead- Bore her free-faced to the free airs of heaven, What did he then not die: he is here and halo Not plunge headforemost from the mountain there, And leave the name of Lover's Leap: not he: He knew the meaning of the whisper now, Thought that he knew it. This, I stay'd for this; O love, I have not seen you for so long. Now, now, will I go down into the gravo, I will be all alone with all I love, And kiss her on the lips. She is his no more : To kiss the dead.' The fancy stirr'd him so He rose and went, and entering the dim vault, His lady with the moonlight on her face ; Her breast as in a shadow-prison, bars Of black and bands of silver, which the moon |