SAT down close to my table, and leaning my head upon my hand, I began to figure to myself the captive in his dungeon, as if I looked through the twilight of his grated door to take his picture. I beheld his body half wasted away by long expectation, and felt what a sickness of the heart it is which arises from hope deferred. On looking nearer, I saw him pale and feverish; in thirty years the breeze had not once fanned his veins; he had seen no sun, no moon, in all that time, nor had the voice of friend or kinsman breathed through his lattice; his children-but here my heart began to bleed, and I was forced to go on with another part of the portrait. He was sitting on the ground, in the farthest corner of his dungeon, upon a little straw, which was alternately his chair and bed; a little calendar of sticks lay at the head, notched all over with the dismal days and nights he had passed there; he had one of those little sticks in his hand, and with a rusty nail he was etching another day of misery to add to the heap. As I darkened the little light he had, he lifted up a hopeless eye towards the door, then cast it down, shook his head, and went on with his work of affliction. I heard the chains upon his legs as he turned his body to lay the little stick upon the bundle. He gave a deep sigh; I saw the iron enter into his soul. I burst into tears; I could not sustain the picture of confinement that my fancy had drawn. Cauld blew the bitter-biting North Scarce rear'd above the parent earth The flaunting flowers our gardens yield, O' clod or stane, Adorns the histie stibble-field, Unseen, alane. There in thy scanty mantle clad, But now the share uptears thy bed, Such is the fate of artless maid, Sweet flow'ret of the rural shade! By love's simplicity betray'd, And guileless trust, Till she, like thee, all soil'd, is laid |