Mazelli, and Other Poems | Page 6

for ever in my breast.?Yet how ecstatically sweet,?Was its first soft tumultuous beat!?I little thought that beat could be?The harbinger of misery;?And daily, when the morning beam?Dawned earliest on wood and stream,?When, from each brake and bush were heard,?The hum of bee, and chirp of bird,?From these, earth's matin songs, my ear?Would turn, a sweeter voice to hear--?A voice, whose tones the very air?Seemed trembling with delight to bear;?From leafy wood, and misty stream,?From bush, and brake, and morning beam,?Would turn away my wandering eye,?A dearer object to descry,?Till voice so sweet, and form so bright,?Grew part of hearing and of sight.
X1.
Yet my fond love I never told,?But kept it, as the miser keeps,?In his rude hut, his hoarded heaps?Of gleaming gems, and glittering gold:?Gloating in secret o'er the prize,?He fears to show to other eyes;?And so passed many months away,?Till once I heard a comrade say:--?"To-morrow brings her bridal day;?Mazelli leaves the greenwood bower,?Where she has grown its fairest flower,?To bless, with her bright, sunny smile,?A stranger from a distant isle,?Whom love has lured across the sea,?O'er hill and glen, through wood and wild,?Far from his lordly home, to be?Lord of the forest's fairest child."?It was as when a thunder peal?Bursts, crashing from a cloudless sky,?It caused my brain and heart to reel?And throb, with speechless agony:?Yet, when wild Passion's trance was o'er,?And Thought resumed her sway once more,?I breathed a prayer that she might be?Saved from the pangs that tortured me;?That her young heart might never prove?The sting of unrequited love.?My task I then again began,?But ah! how much an altered man,--?A single hour, a few hot tears,?Had done the wasting work of years.
XII.
Nor was it I alone, to whom?Those words had been as words of doom,?By some malicious fiend rehearsed:?Another one was standing by,?With princely port, and piercing eye,?Of dusky cheek, and brow, and plume;?I thought his heaving heart would burst,?His labouring bosom's heave and swell,?So strongly, quickly, rose and fell!?A long, bright blade hung at his side,?Its keen and glittering edge he tried;?He bore a bow, and this he drew,?To see if still its spring were true;?But other sign could none be caught,?Of what he suffered, felt, or thought.?And then with firm and haughty stride,?He turned away, and left my side;?I watched him, as with rapid tread,?Along the river's marge he sped,?Till the still twilight's gathering gloom?Hid haughty form, and waving plume.
Canto II.
I.
He stood where the mountain moss outspread?Its smoothness beneath his dusky foot;?The chestnut boughs above his head,?Hung motionless and mute.?There came not a voice from the wooded hill,?Nor a sound from the shadowy glen,?Save the plaintive song of the whip-poor-will,(2)?And the waterfall's dash, and now and then,?The night-bird's mournful cry.?Deep silence hung round him; the misty light?Of the young moon silvered the brow of Night,?Whose quiet spirit had flung her spell?O'er the valley's depth, and the mountain's height,?And breathed on the air, till its gentle swell?Arose on the ear like some loved one's call;?And the wide blue sky spread over all
Its starry canopy.?And he seemed as the spirit of some chief,?Whose grave could not give him rest;?So deep was the settled hue of grief,?On his manly front impressed:?Yet his lips were compressed with a proud disdain,?And his port was erect and high,?Like the lips of a martyr who mocks at pain,?As the port of a hero who scorns to fly,?When his men have failed in fight;?Who rather a thousand deaths would die,?Than his fame should suffer blight.
II.
And who by kith, and who by name,?Is he, that lone, yet haughty one??By his high brow, and eye of flame,?I guess him old Ottalli's son.?Ottalli! whose proud name was here?In other times, a sound of fear!?The fleet of foot, and strong of hand,?Chief of his tribe, lord of the land,?The forest child, of mind and soul?Too wild and free to brook control!?In chase was none so swift as he,?In battle none so brave and strong;?To friends, all love and constancy,--?But we to those who wrought him wrong!?His arm would wage avenging strife,?With bow, and spear, and bloody knife,?Till he had taught his foes to feel,?How true his aim, how keen his steel.?Now others hold the sway he held,--?His day and power have passed away;?His goodly forests all are felled,?And songs of mirth rise, clear and gay,?Chaunted by youthful voices, where?His battle-hymn once filled the air--?Where blazed the lurid council fire,?The village church erects its spire;?And where the mystic war-dance rang,?With its confused, discordant clang,?While stern, fierce lips, with many a cry?For blood and vengeance, filled the sky,?Mild Mercy, gentle as the dove,?Proclaims her rule of peace and love.?And of his true and faithful clan,?Of child and matron, maid and man,?Of all he loved, survives but one--?His earliest, and his only son!?That son's sole heritage his fame,?His strength, his likeness, and his name.
III.
And thus from varying year to