Ere three months passed. For her he never died! Immortalised by faith that bond lived on; And now close by, and now 'mid Saints of heaven She saw her husband walk. She never wept; That fire which lit her eye and flushed her cheek Dried up, it seemed, her tears: the neighbours round Called her "the lady of the happy marriage." She died long since, I doubt not.' Forward stepped A slight, pale maid, the daughter of a bard, And answered thus: 'Two months ago she died.' Then Cuthbert: 'Tell me, maiden, of her death; And see you be not chary of your words, For well I loved that woman.' Tears unfelt Fast streaming down her pallid cheek, the maid Replied--yet often paused: 'A sad, sweet end! A long night's pain had left her living still: I found her on the threshold of her door:-- Her cheek was white; but, trembling round her lips, And dimly o'er her countenance spread, there lay Something that, held in check by feebleness, Yet tended to a smile. A cloak tight-drawn From the cold March wind screened her, save one hand Stretched on her knee, that reached to where a beam, Thin slip of watery sunshine, sunset's last, Slid through the branches. On that beam, methought, Rested her eyes half-closed. It was not so: For when I knelt, and kissed that hand ill-warmed, Smiling she said: "The small, unwedded maid Has missed her mark! You should have kissed the ring! Full forty years upon a widowed hand It holds its own. It takes its latest sunshine." She lived through all that night, and died while dawned Through snows Saint Joseph's morn.' The Queen, with hand Sudden and swift, brushed from her cheek a tear; And many a sob from that thick-crowding host Confessed what tenderest love can live in hearts Defamed by fools as barbarous. Cuthbert sat In silence long. Before his eyes she passed, The maid, the wife, the widow, all in one; With these,--through these--he saw once more the child, Yea, saw the child's smile on the lips of death, That magic, mystic, smile! O heart of man, What strange capacities of grief and joy Are thine! How vain, how ruthless such, if given For transient things alone! O life of man! What wert thou but some laughing demon's scoff, If prelude only to the eternal grave! 'Deep cries to deep'--ay, but the deepest deep Crying to summits of the mount of God Drags forth for echo, 'Immortality.' It was the Death Divine that vanquished death! Shorn of that Death Divine the Life Divine, Albeit its feeblest tear had cleansed all worlds, Cancelled all guilt, had failed to reach and sound The deepest in man's nature, Love and Grief, Profoundest each when joined in penitent woe; Failed thence to wake man's hope. The loftiest light Flashed from God's Face on Reason's orient verge