Gửi Augusta (II) Stanzas to Augusta (II)

Stanzas to Augusta (II)

Though the day of my Destiny’s over,
⁠And the star of my Fate hath declined,
Thy soft heart refused to discover
⁠The faults which so many could find;
Though thy Soul with my grief was acquainted,
⁠It shrunk not to share it with me,
And the Love which my Spurit hath painted
⁠It never hath found but in Thee.

Then when Nature around me is smiling,
⁠The last smile which answers to mine,
I do not believe it beguiling,
⁠Because it reminds me of thine;
And when winds are at war with the ocean,
⁠As the breasts I believed in with me,
If their billows excite an emotion,
⁠It is that they bear me from Thee.

Though the rock of my last Hope is shivered,
⁠And its fragments are sunk in the wave,
Though I feel that my soul is delivered
⁠To Pain—it shall not be its slave.
There is many a pang to pursue me:
⁠They may crush, but they shall not contemn;
They may torture, but shall not subdue me;
⁠’Tis of Thee that I think—not of them.

Though human, thou didst not deceive me,
⁠Though woman, thou didst not forsake,
Though loved, thou forborest to grieve me,
⁠Though slandered, thou never couldst shake;
Though trusted, thou didst not disclaim me,
⁠Though parted, it was not to fly,
Though watchful, ‘twas not to defame me,
⁠Nor mute, that the world might belie.

Yet I blame not the World, nor despise it,
⁠Nor the war of the many with one;
If my Soul was not fitted to prize it,
⁠’Twas folly not sooner to shun:
And if dearly that error hath cost me,
⁠And more than I once could foresee,
I have found that, whatever it lost me,
⁠It could not deprive me of Thee.

From the wreck of the past, which hath perished,
⁠Thus much I at least may recall,
It hath taught me that what I most cherished
⁠Deserved to be dearest of all:
In the Desert a fountain is springing,
⁠In the wide waste there still is a tree,
And a bird in the solitude singing,
⁠Which speaks to my spirit of Thee.