140 EDWIN MORRIS; OR, THE LAKE.

Nor cared to hear? perhaps : yet long ago
I have pardon'd little Letty; not indeed,
It may be, for her own dear sake but this,
She seems a part of those fresh days to me;
For in the dust and drouth of London life

She moves among my visions of the lake,

While the prime swallow dips his wing, or then While the gold-lily blows, and overhead

The light cloud smoulders on the summer crag.

Unfit for earth, unfit for heaven, scarce meet

For troops of devils, mad with blasphemy,

I will not cease to grasp the hope I hold

Of saintdom, and to clamour, mourn and sob, Battering the gates of heaven with storms of prayer,

Have mercy, Lord, and take away my sin.

Let this avail, just, dreadful, mighty God,

This not be all in vain, that thrice ten years,

Thrice multiplied by superhuman pangs,

In hungers and in thirsts, fevers and cold,

In coughs, aches, stitches, ulcerous throes and

cramps,

A sign betwixt the meadow and the cloud,

Patient on this tall pillar I have borne

Rain, wind, frost, heat, hail, damp, and sleet, and

snow;

And I had hoped that ere this period closed
Thou wouldst have caught me up into thy rest,
Denying not these weather-beaten limbs

The meed of saints, the white robe and the palm.
O take the meaning, Lord: I do not breathe,

Not whisper, any murmur of complaint.

Pain heap'd ten-hundred-fold to this, were still
Less burthen, by ten-hundred-fold, to bear,

Than were those lead-like tons of sin, that crush'd
My spirit flat before thee.

O Lord, Lord,

Thou knowest I bore this better at the first,
For I was strong and hale of body then;

And tho' my teeth, which now are dropt away,
Would chatter with the cold, and all my beard
Was tagg'd with icy fringes in the moon,

I drown'd the whoopings of the owl with sound
Of pious hymns and psalms, and sometimes saw
An angel stand and watch me, as sang.

Now am I feeble grown; my end draws nigh;
I hope my end draws nigh: half deaf I am,
So that I scarce can hear the people hum
About the column's base, and almost blind,
And scarce can recognise the fields I know;
And both my thighs are rotted with the dew;
Yet cease I not to clamour and to cry,

While my stiff spine can hold my weary head, Till all my limbs drop piecemeal from the stone, Have mercy, mercy: take away my sin.

O Jesus, if thou wilt not save my soul,

Who may be saved? who is it may be saved? Who may be made a saint, if I fail here?

Show me the man hath suffer'd more than I.

For did not all thy martyrs die one death?
For either they were stoned, or crucified,
Or burn'd in fire, or boil'd in oil, or sawn
In twain beneath the ribs; but I die here
To-day, and whole years long, a life of death.
Bear witness, if I could have found a way
(And heedfully I sifted all my thought)
More slowly-painful to subdue this home
Of sin, my flesh, which I despise and hate,
I had not stinted practice, O my God.

For not alone this pillar-punishment,

Not this alone I bore: but while I lived
In the white convent down the valley there,

For many weeks about my loins I wore