The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, March 1844

‘Remorse has oft waved his dusky wings
O’er the path I was doom’d to tread;
Despair has long frozen Hope’s warm springs;
I have felt the soul’s madness which Memory brings,
When she wakes up the murder’d dead.

‘Tell me not now of God’s mercy or love!
All hope of pardon is past:
A brother’s blood cries for vengeance above;
This brand on my brow will my foul crime prove—
My torment for ever must last!

‘Thou needst not tremble; this arm is bound,
And its iron strength is gone;
Despair came down in the hollow sound
Of my fetters, which clank’d on the loathing ground
Where my wearied limbs I had thrown.

‘I snatched the knife from my jailor’s side
And buried it in my breast,
But they cruelly staunched the gushing tide,
And closed the wound, though ’twas deep and wide,
And still I might not rest!

‘Day after day I had gnawed my chain,
Till I sharpened the stubborn link;
But when I had pierced the swollen vein,
And was writhing in death’s last dreadful pain,
While just on eternity’s brink:

‘Even then the leech’s skill prevailed;
I was saved for a darker fate!
My very guards ’neath my stern glance quailed,
And with their cloaks their faces veiled
As they passed the fast-barred grate.

‘I LOVED! Thou know’st not half the power
Of woman’s love-lit eye;
Her voice can soothe death’s gloomy hour,
Her smiles dispel the clouds which lower
When Affliction’s sea rolls high.

‘My heart seemed cold as the frozen snow
Which binds dark Ætna’s form,
But Love raged there with the lava’s flow,
And madden’d my soul with the scorching glow
Of strong passion’s thunder-storm.’

‘I told my love: O God! even still
I hear the Tempter’s voice,
Which whispered the thought in my mind, to fill
My page of crime with a deed of ill
That made all hell rejoice.

‘I knelt at her feet, and my proud heart burn’d
When she spoke of my brother’s love;
Affection’s warmth to deep hate was turn’d;
His proffered hand in my wrath I spurn’d—
Not all his prayers could move.

‘At dead of night to his room I crept,
As noiseless as the grave;
Disturbed in his dreams, my brother wept,
And softly murmur’d her name while he slept;
That word new fury gave!

‘The sound from his lip had scarcely passed,
When my dagger pierced his heart:
One dying look on me he cast—
That awful look in my soul will last
When body and soul shall part!

‘When the deed was done, in horror I gazed
On the face of the murder’d dead;
His dark and brilliant eye was glazed:
When I thought for a moment his arm he raised,
I hid my face in the bed.

‘I could not move from the spot where I stood;
A chilliness froze my mind:
My clothes were dyed with my brother’s blood,
The body lay in a crimson flood,
Which clotted his hair behind!

‘And over my heart that moment pass’d
A vision of former years,
Ere sin upon my soul had cast
It’s withering blight, it’s poison-blast,
It’s cloud of guilty fears.

‘The home where our youth’s first hours flew by,
In its beauty before me rose;
The holy love of our mother’s eye,
Our childhood’s pure and cloudless sky
And its light and fleeting woes.

‘When our hearts in strong affection’s chain
Were so closely, fondly tied,
That our thoughts and feelings, pleasure and pain,