THE LADY ALICE.

I.

What doth the Lady Alice so late on the turret-stair,

Without a lamp to light her but the diamond in her hair;

When every arching passage overflows with shallow gloom,

And dreams float through the castle, into every silent room?

She trembles at her footsteps, although their fall is light;

For through the turret-loopholes she sees the murky night,—

Black, broken vapours streaming across the stormy skies,—

Along the empty corridors the moaning tempest cries.

She steals along a gallery, she pauses by a door;

And fast her tears are dropping down upon the oaken floor;

And thrice she seems returning,—but thrice she turns again;—

Now heavy lie the cloud of sleep on that old father’s brain!

Oh, well it were that never thou should’st waken from thy sleep!

For wherefore should they waken who waken but to weep?

No more, no more beside thy bed may Peace her vigil keep;

Thy sorrow, like a lion, waits^[1] upon its prey to leap.

II.

An afternoon in April. No sun appears on high;

A moist and yellow lustre fills the deepness of the sky;

And through the castle gateway, with slow and solemn tread,

Along the leafless avenue they bear the honoured dead.

They stop. The long line closes up, like some gigantic worm;

A shape is standing in the path; a wan and ghostlike form;

Which gazes fixedly, nor moves; nor utters any sound;

Then, like a statue built of snow, falls lifeless to the ground.

And though her clothes are ragged, and though her feet are bare;

And though all wild and tangled, falls her heavy silk-brown hair;

Though from her eyes the brightness, from her cheeks the bloom, has fled;

They know their Lady Alice, the Darling of the Dead.

With silence, in her own old room the fainting form they lay;

Where all things stand unaltered since the night she fled away;

But who shall bring to life again her father from the clay?

But who shall give her back again her heart of that old day?