I HAVE settled at last, in a sombre nook,
In the far-off heart of the Norland hills,
There's a dark pine forest before my gates,
And behind is the voice of rills
That murmur all day, and murmur all night,
Through the tangled copses green and lone,
Where, couched in the depths of the shadowy leaves,
The wood-dove makes her moan.
My home is a castle ancient and worn,
With hoary walls, and with crumbling floors,
And the burglar-winds their entrance force
Through the cobwebbed panes and doors.
I can hardly say that a roof is mine,
For whene'er the mountain tempests rise,
A deluge is poured through its countless rents,
Wide open to air and skies!
Ah! Nature alone keeps a wholesome mien,
In the midst of a squalor wildly bare,
And I draw sometimes from her bounteous breast
Brief balms for the heart's despair:
All human friends that were loyal have died,
And the false and treacherous only stay,
To poison the soul with their serpent tongues
In my fortune's dull decay!
Distant and dim in the perishing past
Grow the joys that made its springtime sweet,
And the last of the saving angels--Hope--
Hath spurned my lot with her shining feet;
Ambition is dead, and if love survives,
Her lip, it is pale, and her eyes forlorn
As beams of the waning stars that melt
In a clouded winter's morn.
I have met my fate as a man should meet
What cannot be vanquished, nor put aside,
I have striven with spirit and force to stem
Its rushing and mighty tide;
But the godlike nerve, and the iron will,
They were not granted to me, I say,
And therefore a waif on an angry sea,
I am drifting, drifting away!
Ay! drifting, and drifting, and drifting away,
Not a hand upraised, nor a cry for aid;
And hoarser the voice of the storm-wind swells,
And darker the wild night-shade;
There are breakers ahead that will crush me soon,
How much, O God! do thy creatures bear!
I marvel if somewhere, in heaven or hell,
This riddle of life grows clear!
