ing years, Lids never wet, unless with joyous tears, When, the day's swan, she swam along the cheers Of the Alcalá, five happy months ago? The guns were shouting Io Hymen then That, on her birthday, now denounce her doom; The same white steeds that tossed their scorn of men To-day as proudly drag her to the tomb. 1 Anything more tragic than the circumstances of her death it would be hard to imagine. She was actually receiving extreme unction while the guns were firing in honor of her eighteenth birthday, and four days later we saw her dragged to her dreary tomb at the Escorial, followed by the coach and its eight white horses in which she had driven in triumph from the church to the palace on the day of her wedding. The poor brutes tossed their snowy plumes as haughtily now as then. (LOWELL, in a letter to his daughter, Mabel Lowell Burnett, July 26, 1878. Quoted by permission of Messrs. Harper and Brothers.) It is a wee sad-colored thing, As shy and secret as a maid, That, ere in choir the robins sing, Pipes its own name like one afraid. It seems pain-prompted to repeat The story of some ancient ill, But Phabe! Phoebe! sadly sweet Is all it says, and then is still. It calls and listens. Earth and sky, Comes from its doom-dissevered mate. Phœbe! it calls and calls again, And Ovid, could he but have heard, Had hung a legendary pain About the memory of the bird; A pain articulate so long, penance of some mouldered crime 10 20 2 For Lowell's careful revision of this poem, see his letters to Mr. Richard Watson Gilder, September 4, 5, 6, 8, and 12, and October 24, 1881; quoted in the Cam bridge Edition of Lowell, pp. 480–481. |