Or change of scene did more than tenderest care; Three weeks were scarce completed, to his home, He wrote to say, he thought he now could come, His usual work was sure he could resume, And something said about the place’s gloom, And how he loathed idling his time away. O, but they wrote, his wife and all, to say He must not think of it, ’twas quite too quick; Let was their house, her mother still was sick, Three months were given, and three he ought to take; For his, and hers, and for his children’s sake. He wrote again, ’twas weariness to wait, This doing nothing was a thing to hate; He’d cast his nine laborious years away, And was as fresh as on his wedding-day; At last he yielded, feared he must obey. And now, his health repaired, his spirits grown Less feeble, less he cared to live alone. ’Twas easier now to face the crowded shore, And table d’hôte less tedious than before; His ancient silence sometimes he would break, And the mute Englishman was heard to speak. His youthful colour soon, his youthful air Came back; amongst the crowd of idlers there, With whom good looks entitle to good name, For his good looks he gained a sort of fame, People would watch him as he went and came. Explain the tragic mystery who can, Something there is, we know not what, in man, With all established happiness at strife, And bent on revolution in his life. Explain the plan of Providence who dare, And tell us wherefore in this world there are Beings who seem for this alone to live, Temptation to another soul to give. A beauteous woman at the table d’hôte, To try this English heart, at least to note This English countenance, conceived the whim. She sat exactly opposite to him. Ere long he noticed with a vague surprise How every day on him she bent her eyes; Soft and inquiring now they looked, and then Wholly withdrawn, unnoticed came again; His shrunk aside: and yet there came a day, Alas! they did not wholly turn away. So beautiful her beauty was, so strange, And to his northern feeling such a change; Her throat and neck Junonian in their grace; The blood just mantled in her southern face: Dark hair, dark eyes; and all the arts she had With which some dreadful power adorns the bad,— Bad women in their youth,—and young was she, Twenty perhaps, at the utmost twenty-three,— And timid seemed, and innocent of ill;— Her feelings went and came without her will. You will not wish minutely to know all His efforts in the prospect of the fall. He oscillated to and fro, he took High courage oft, temptation from him shook, Compelled himself to virtuous thoughts and just, And as it were in ashes and in dust Abhorred his thought. But living thus alone, Of solitary tedium weary grown; From sweet society so long debarred, And fearing in his judgment to be hard On her—that he was sometimes off his guard