Page:Hemans in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine 25 1829.pdf/4

 Love's last vain clinging unto life; and now A mist of dreams was hovering o'er her brow, Her eye was fix'd, her spirit seem'd removed, Though not from earth, from all it knew or loved, Far, far away:—her handmaids watch'd around, In awe, that lent to each low, midnight sound A might, a mystery; and the quivering light Of wind-sway'd lamps, made spectral in their sight The forms of buried beauty, sad, yet fair, Gleaming along the walls, with braided hair, Long in the dust grown dim:—And she, too, saw, But with the spirit's eye of raptured awe, Those pictured shapes:—a bright, but solemn train, Beckoning, they floated o'er her dreamy brain, Clothed in diviner hues; while on her ear Strange voices fell, which none besides might hear; Sweet, yet profoundly mournful, as the sigh Of winds o'er harp-strings through a midnight sky; And thus, it seem’d, in that low, thrilling tone, Th’Ancestral Shadows call'd away their own.

And with her spirit rapt in that wild lay, She pass'd, as twilight melts to night, away! F. H.