Sweet, when thy brow becomes the haunted spot
Of Death's grim heralds, care and wasting pain,
And all my bitter prayers return again,
Outcasts of heaven whose pity heeds them not;
In desperate haste, by love and fear begot,
I ask of nature why she formed in vain
This fairest fabric of her subtle brain--
In vain, if subject to the common lot.
The hungry earth is dumb, a sullen moan
Sighs from the hollows of the breaking wave,
And the great winds awaken but to groan;
While through the cypress glints the ghostly stone,
Whose pallid finger, from the silent grave,
Points to a mystery solved in heaven alone.