From prayer to book, from book to mass, And all in high Baronial pride,- A life both dull and dignified;-Yet as Lord Marmion nothing press’d Upon her intervals of rest, Dejected Clara well could bear The formal state, the lengthen’d prayer,Though dearest to her wounded heart The hours that she might spend apart.
II.
I said, Tantallon’s dizzy steep Hung o’er the margin of the deep.Many a rude tower and rampart there Repell’d the insult of the air, Which, when the tempest vex’d the sky, Half breeze, half spray, came whistling by.Above the rest, a turret square Did o’er its Gothic entrance bear, Of sculpture rude, a stony shield; The Bloody Heart was in the Field, And in the chief three mullets stood, The cognizance of Douglas blood.The turret held a narrow stair, Which, mounted, gave you access where A parapet’s embattled row Did seaward round the castle go.Sometimes in dizzy steps descending, Sometimes in narrow circuit bending, Sometimes in platform broad extending, Its varying circle did combine Bulwark, and bartisan, and line, And bastion, tower, and vantage-coign:Above the booming ocean leant The far-projecting battlement; The billows burst, in ceaseless flow, Upon the precipice below. Where’er Tantallon faced the land, Gate-works, and walls, were strongly mann’d; No need upon the sea-girt side; The steepy rock, and frantic tide, Approach of human step denied; And thus these lines, and ramparts rude, Were left in deepest solitude.
III.
And, for they were so lonely, Clare Would to these battlements repair, And muse upon her sorrows there, And list the sea-bird’s cry; Or slow, like noontide ghost, would glide Along the dark-grey bulwarks’ side, And ever on the heaving tide Look down with weary eye.Oft did the cliff, and swelling main, Recall the thoughts of Whitby’s fane,? A home she ne’er might see again; For she had laid adown, So Douglas bade, the hood and veil, And frontlet of the cloister pale, And Benedictine gown:It were unseemly sight, he said, A novice out of convent shade.- Now her bright locks, with sunny glow, Again adorn’d her brow of snow;
