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,
As who should say 'continue." Well, he had

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
By that which follow'd-but of this I deem

As of the visions that he told the event
Glanced back upon them in his after life,

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-
Dead-and had lain three days without a pulse :
All that look'd on her had pronounced her dead.
And so they bore her (for in Julian's land
They never nail a dumb head up in elm),

Bore her free-faced to the free airs of heaven,
And laid her in the vault of her own kin.

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 :
The dead returns to me, and I go down

To kiss the dead.'

The fancy stirr'd him so

He rose and went, and entering the dim vault,
And, making there a sudden light, beheld
All round about him that which all will be.
The light was but a flash, and went again.
Then at the far end of the vault he saw

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