THE VISION

OF

THE MAID OF ORLEANS.

THE FIRST BOOK.

ORLEANS was hush'd in sleep. Stretch'd on her couch
The delegated Maiden lay; with toil
Exhausted, and sore anguish, soon she closed

Her heavy eyelids; not reposing then,

For busy phantasy in other scenes

Awaken'd: whether that superior powers,

By wise permission, prompt the midnight dream,

Instructing best the passive faculty;

Or that the soul, escaped its fleshly clog,

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Flies free, and soars amid the invisible world, 10

And all things are that seem.

Along a moor,

Barren, and wide, and drear, and desolate,

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She roam'd, a wanderer through the cheerless night.
Far through the silence of the unbroken plain
The bittern's boom was heard; hoarse, heavy, deep,

It made accordant music to the scene.

Black clouds, driven fast before the stormy wind,

Swept shadowing; through their broken folds the moon
Struggled at times with transitory ray,
And made the moving darkness visible.
And now arrived beside a fenny lake

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She stands, amid whose stagnate waters, hoarse
The long reeds rustled to the gale of night.
A time-worn bark receives the Maid, impell'd
By powers unseen; then did the moon display 25
Where through the crazy vessel's yawning side
The muddy waters oozed. A Woman guides,
And spreads the sail before the wind, which moan'd
As melancholy mournful to her ear,

As ever by a dungeon'd wretch was heard

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Howling at evening round his prison towers.
Wan was the pilot's countenance, her eyes
Hollow, and her sunk cheeks were furrow'd deep,
Channell❜d by tears; a few grey locks hung down
Beneath her hood: and through the Maiden's veins
Chill crept the blood, when, as the night-breeze pass'd,
Lifting her tatter'd mantle, coil'd around

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She saw a serpent gnawing at her heart.

The plumeless bats with short shrill note flit by,

And the night-raven's scream came fitfully,

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Borne on the hollow blast. Eager the Maid

Look'd to the shore, and now upon the bank
Leapt, joyful to escape, yet trembling still
In recollection.

There, a mouldering pile

Stretch'd its wide ruins, o'er the plain below Casting a gloomy shade, save where the moon Shone through its fretted windows: the dark yew,

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Withering with age, branch'd there its naked roots, And there the melancholy cypress rear'd

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Its head; the earth was heaved with many a mound, And here and there a half-demolish'd tomb.

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And now, amid the ruin's darkest shade, The Virgin's eye beheld where pale blue flames Rose wavering, now just gleaming from the earth, And now in darkness drown'd. An aged man Sate near, seated on what in long-past days Had been some sculptured monument, now fallen And half-obscured by moss, and gather'd heaps Of wither'd yew-leaves and earth-mouldering bones. His eye was large and rayless, and fix'd full Upon the Maid; the tomb-fires on his face Shed a blue light; his face was of the hue

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Of death; his limbs were mantled in a shroud.
Then with a deep heart-terrifying voice,

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Exclaim'd the spectre, "Welcome to these realms,

These regions of Despair, O thou whose steps.

Sorrow hath guided to my sad abodes!

Welcome to my drear empire, to this gloom

Eternal, to this everlasting night,

Where never morning darts the enlivening ray, 70

Where never shines the sun, but all is dark,
Dark as the bosom of their gloomy King."

So saying, he arose, and drawing on,

Her to the abbey's inner ruin led,

Resisting not his guidance. Through the roof, 75 Once fretted and emblazed, but broken now

In part, elsewhere all open to the sky,

The moon-beams enter'd, chequer'd here, and here With unimpeded light. The ivy twined

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Round the dismantled columns; imaged forms 80
Of saints and warlike chiefs, moss-canker'd now
And mutilate, lay strewn upon the ground,
With crumbled fragments, crucifixes fallen,
And rusted trophies. Meantime overhead
Roar'd the loud blast, and from the tower the owl
Scream'd as the tempest shook her secret nest.
He, silent, led her on, and often paused,
And pointed, that her eye might contemplate
At leisure the drear scene.

He dragg'd her on

Through a low iron door, down broken stairs;

Then a cold horror through the Maiden's frame
Crept, for she stood amid a vault, and saw,
By the sepulchral lamp's dim glaring light,
The fragments of the dead.

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"Look here!" he cried,

"Damsel, look here! survey this house of death;

O soon to tenant it; soon to increase

These trophies of mortality,.. for hence

Is no return. Gaze here; behold this skull,

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These eyeless sockets, and these unflesh'd jaws,
That with their ghastly grinning seem to mock 100
Thy perishable charms; for thus thy cheek
Must moulder. Child of grief! shrinks not thy soul,
Viewing these horrors? trembles not thy heart
At the dread thought that here its life's-blood soon
Shall stagnate, and the finely-fibred frame,
Now warm in life and feeling, mingle soon
With the cold clod? thing horrible to think,..

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peace;

grave.

Yet in thought only, for reality
Is none of suffering here; here all is
No nerve will throb to anguish in the
Dreadful it is to think of losing life,
But having lost, knowledge of loss is not,
Therefore no ill. Oh, wherefore then delay
To end all ills at once!"

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So spake Despair. The vaulted roof echoed his hollow voice, And all again was silence. Quick her heart Panted. He placed a dagger in her hand, And cried again, "Oh wherefore then delay! One blow, and rest for ever!" On the fiend, Dark scowl'd the Virgin with indignant eye, And threw the dagger down. He next his heart Replaced the murderous steel, and drew the Maid Along the downward vault.

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The damp earth gave
A dim sound as they pass'd: the tainted air
Was cold, and heavy with unwholesome dews. 125
"Behold!" the fiend exclaim'd, "how loathsomely
The fleshly remnant of mortality

Moulders to clay!" then fixing his broad eye
Full on her face, he pointed where a corpse

Lay livid; she beheld with horrent look,
The spectacle abhorr'd by living man.

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"Look here!" Despair pursued, "this loathsome

mass

Was once as lovely, and as full of life

As, Damsel, thou art now. Those deep-sunk eyes Once beam'd the mild light of intelligence,

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