The coffin [14] as I past across the lane

Came sudden on my view. It was not here,

A sight of every day, as in the streets

Of the great city, and we paus’d and ask’d

Who to the grave was going. It was one,

A village girl, they told us, who had borne

An eighteen months strange illness, and had pined

With such slow wasting that the hour of death

Came welcome to her. We pursued our way

To the house of mirth, and with that idle talk

That passes o’er the mind and is forgot,

We wore away the time. But it was eve

When homewardly I went, and in the air

Was that cool freshness, that discolouring shade

That makes the eye turn inward. Then I heard

Over the vale the heavy toll of death

Sound slow; it made me think upon the dead,

I questioned more and learnt her sorrowful tale.

She bore unhusbanded a mother’s name,

And he who should have cherished her, far off

Sail’d on the seas, self-exil’d from his home,

For he was poor. Left thus, a wretched one,

Scorn made a mock of her, and evil tongues

Were busy with her name. She had one ill

Heavier, neglect, forgetfulness from him

Whom she had loved so dearly. Once he wrote,

But only once that drop of comfort came

To mingle with her cup of wretchedness;

And when his parents had some tidings from him,

There was no mention of poor Hannah there,

Or ’twas the cold enquiry, bitterer

Than silence. So she pined and pined away

And for herself and baby toil’d and toil’d,

Nor did she, even on her death bed, rest

From labour, knitting with her outstretch’d arms

Till she sunk with very weakness. Her old mother

Omitted no kind office, and she work’d

Hard, and with hardest working barely earn’d

Enough to make life struggle and prolong

The pains of grief and sickness. Thus she lay

On the sick bed of poverty, so worn

With her long suffering and that painful thought

That at her heart lay rankling, and so weak,

That she could make no effort to express

Affection for her infant; and the child,

Whose lisping love perhaps had solaced her

With a strange infantine ingratitude

Shunn’d her as one indifferent. She was past

That anguish, for she felt her hour draw on,

And ’twas her only comfoft now to think

Upon the grave. “Poor girl!” her mother said,

“Thou hast suffered much!” “aye mother! there is none

“Can tell what I have suffered!” she replied,

“But I shall soon be where the weary rest.”

And she did rest her soon, for it pleased God

To take her to his mercy.

[14] It is proper to remark that the story related in this Eclogue is strictly true. I met the funeral, and learnt the circumstances in a village in Hampshire. The indifference of the child was mentioned to me; indeed no addition whatever has been made to the story. I should have thought it wrong to have weakened the effect of a faithful narrative by adding any thing.