Scattered at intervals and wreathing smoke
Arising from such rustic roofs;--the hill
Was crown'd with a peculiar diadem
Of trees, in circular array, so fixed,
Not by the sport of nature, but of man:
These two, a maiden and a youth, were there
Gazing--the one on all that was beneath
Fair as herself--but the boy gazed on her;
And both were fair, and one was beautiful:
And both were young--yet not alike in youth:
As the sweet moon in the horizon's verge,
The maid was on the verge of womanhood;
The boy had fewer summers, but his heart
Had far outgrown his years, and to his eye
There was but one beloved face on earth,
And that was shining on him."
I stood upon the spot consecrated by this memorable interview. Below me
extended the "living landscape," once contemplated by the loving pair;
the gentle valley of Newstead, diversified by woods and corn-fields,
and village spires, and gleams of water, and the distant towers and
pinnacles of the venerable Abbey. The diadem of trees, however, was
gone. The attention drawn to it by the poet, and the romantic manner in
which he had associated it with his early passion for Mary Chaworth,
had nettled the irritable feelings of her husband, who but ill brooked
the poetic celebrity conferred on his wife by the enamored verses of
another.
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