A FRAGMENT. 365 



I feel sure of my vengeance at the appointed hour, and, should Satan 

 himself say no, I would still persist." 



" It must be indeed terrible, your vengeance." The duchess 

 smiled bitterly. < Do you remember Cain, Perez Cain with the 

 mark of sin upon his brow, whom a fearful and destructive fatality 

 followed in his steps, shedding death and desolation around him on 

 every side, condemned to be for ever the centre of odious crime'?'' 



" Well ?" said Perez, trembling. 



" Well ! Cain the condemned that shall be him the fatality 

 shall be Rita." 



A FRAGMENT. 



I WAS the child 



Of early sorrows; for the hand that reared 

 My infancy, the bosom where I wept 

 Imaginary griefs, too soon withdrew 

 Their wholesome strength and shelter. Other cares 

 That sympathy controlled which I had dreamed 

 My own, my bright inheritance ; and I, 

 Denied the tenderness I once embraced, 

 Became, ere yet the germ of mind disclosed 

 The bud of after-thought, a lone recluse, 

 A solitary in an unknown world 

 Of moral subtleties. How oft betrayed, 

 How far I wandered in that trackless maze 

 Which all the idiot and the wise pursue, 

 I need not now discourse, since time has closed 

 Almost upon the memory of those days. 

 But soon a summons to the couch of care 

 It proved the couch of death recalled the dream 

 Of other days : and fountains that had long 

 Denied their streams in envious torrents burst 

 Upon a broken heart ; for there that hand 

 That bosom lay where I had oft reclined. 

 Trembling I glanced upon the pallid cheek, 

 The eye whose lustre grief, not time, had quenched, 

 And wondered if within a soul estranged 

 There yet survived a token of its love 

 For one, though long deserted, still a part 

 Of its own being. Time had not effaced 

 And sorrows but refined the bloom that once 

 My spirit loved, the mantle of that cheek, 

 And all, save those dim sightless eyes, brought back 

 The very tenderness my childhood knew. 

 I dare not with minuteness now retrace 

 The subtile transformations of the mind 

 In that emergency of hope and dread, 

 When every moment formed a history 

 Of painful revolutions. These are things 

 By all to be remembered, not rehearsed, 

 But, if thou canst a parallel divine, 

 Bethink thee of a heart whose tendrils twined 

 Around its parent stem, and knew no home 

 But in its soft embrace, developing 

 In many an artless trait the lineaments 

 It learned to love so well, until it grew 



