For all delights are shadows now!
And from my brain to my dull brow
The heavy tears gather and flow:
I cannot speak: Oh let me weep!
The tears which fell from her wan eyes415
Glimmered among the moonlight dew:
Her deep hard sobs and heavy sighs
Their echoes in the darkness threw.
When she grew calm, she thus did keep
The tenor of her tale:
He died:420
I know not how: he was not old,
If age be numbered by its years:
But he was bowed and bent with fears,
Pale with the quenchless thirst of gold,
Which, like fierce fever, left him weak;425
And his strait lip and bloated cheek
Were warped in spasms by hollow sneers;
And selfish cares with barren plough,
Not age, had lined his narrow brow,
And foul and cruel thoughts, which feed430
Upon the withering life within,
Like vipers on some poisonous weed.
Whether his ill were death or sin
None knew, until he died indeed,
undergone since the birth of my first child only admitted an interchange of places between the thirst of death and these fair shadows,"—but being then used in the sense of only, alone. It is, however, likely enough that this is one of the passages in which we are to look for those "errors in the sense" referred to in the letter to Mr. Ollier (see page 2). If it be so, I should suspect the word which in line 405, and the word and in line 408: among the commonest printer's errors are which for while, and and for had; and, assuming those in this case, we get clear sense enough:
While all that I had undergone
Of grief and shame, since she, who first
The gates of that dark refuge closed,
Came to my sight, had almost burst, &c.
Each new child, that is to say, weaned her from the thirst of death, while her sufferings, since the birth of the first, had almost burst the seal which that first had put upon the "Lethean spring" of death.
