EUTHANASIA. I. WHEN Time, or soon or late, shall bring Wave gently o'er my dying bed! 2. No band of friends or heirs be there,1 3. But silent let me sink to Earth, With no officious mourners near: 4. Yet Love, if Love in such an hour In her who lives, and him who dies. 5. 'Twere sweet, my Psyche! to the last 1. [Compare A Wish, by Matthew Arnold, stanza 3, etc.-"Spare me the whispering, crowded room, The friends who come and gape and go," etc.] Forgetful of its struggles past, E'en Pain itself should smile on thee. 6. But vain the wish-for Beauty still Will shrink, as shrinks the ebbing breath; And Woman's tears, produced at will, Deceive in life, unman in death. 7. Then lonely be my latest hour, Without regret, without a groan; For thousands Death hath ceased to lower, 8. "Aye but to die, and go," alas! Where all have gone, and all must go! To be the nothing that I was Ere born to life and living woe! 9. Count o'er the joys thine hours have seen, 'Tis something better not to be. [First published, Childe Harold, 1812 (Second Edition).] AND THOU ART DEAD, AS YOUNG AND FAIR. "Heu, quanto minus est cum reliquis versari quam tui meminisse!" I. AND thou art dead, as young and fair As aught of mortal birth; And form so soft, and charms so rare, Though Earth received them in her bed, There is an eye which could not brook A moment on that grave to look. i. Stanzas.-[Editions 1812–1831.] ii. Are mingled with the Earth.-[MS.] Were never meant for Earth.—[MS. erased.] iii. Unhonoured with the vulgar dread.-[MS. erased.] I. ["The Lovers' Walk is terminated with an ornamental urn, inscribed to Miss Dolman, a beautiful and amiable relation of Mr. Shenstone's, who died of the small-pox, about twenty-one years of age, in the following words on one side : (From a Description of the Leasowes, by A. Dodsley; Poetical Works of William Shenstone [1798], p. xxix.)] 2. I will not ask where thou liest low," Nor gaze upon the spot; There flowers or weeds at will may grow, It is enough for me to prove That what I loved, and long must love, To me there needs no stone to tell, 3. Yet did I love thee to the last As fervently as thou," Who didst not change through all the past, And canst not alter now. The love where Death has set his seal, Nor age can chill, nor rival steal,vi. Nor falsehood disavow: vii. And, what were worse, thou canst not see Or wrong, or change, or fault in me.i 4. The better days of life were ours; i. I will not ask where thou art laid, Nor look upon the name.-[MS. erased.] ii. So I shall know it not.-[MS. erased.] iii. Like common dust can rot.--[MS.] iv. I would not wish to see nor touch.-[MS. erased.] v. As well as warm as thou.-[MS. erased.] vi. MS. transposes lines 5 and 6 of stanza 3. vii. Nor frailty disavow.—[MS.] viii. Nor canst thou fair and fauliless see.—[MS. erased.] ix. Nor wrong, nor change, nor fault in me.— [IS] The sun that cheers, the storm that lowers," Shall never more be thine. The silence of that dreamless sleep" I envy now too much to weep; Nor need I to repine, That all those charms have passed away 5. The flower in ripened bloom unmatched Must fall the earliest prey; iii. Though by no hand untimely snatched, The leaves must drop away: To watch it withering, leaf by leaf, 6. I know not if I could have borne 1v. To see thy beauties fade; The night that followed such a morn Thy day without a cloud hath passed," Extinguished, not decayed; i. The cloud that cheers ii. The sweetness of that silent deep.-[MS.] Is earliest doomed to fade.-[MS. erased.] Destroyed |