catastrophe of Rokeby, by which Mortham mistakes his wife's brother for a former lover, and kills him in her arms, causing thus her death and eliciting the moral:
The deadliest wounds with which we bleed,
Our crimes inflict alone;
Man's mercies from God's hand proceed,
His miseries from his own.
To this she added some verses written at the time of her visits to Belmont, where there is a red rock with a little stream proceeding from it, in a sort of scaur, overgrown with copsewood. Tradition connected with it a story of the time of the Roman occupation of Britain, of a maiden who pined away like Echo on being neglected by her lover:—
Then strange to tell, if rural folks say true,
To hardened rock the stiffening damsel grew.
No more her shapeless features can be known,
Stone is her body, and her limbs are stone.
When the tidings reached the swain, he rushed to the spot and stabbed himself, the dagger piercing to the stone, so that blood issued from it:—
And though revolving ages since have passed
The melting torrents undiminished last.
Armed with these poems, Hannah went to London with Sally in 1776. The result of her criterion was triumphant, though it is only a proof of the evanescence of success. Caddell gave her far more for the verses than she had dared to expect, and promised to raise the
