How long, how endless is each pulse-beat's pain!
Oh, my consumed, oh, my bleeding heart.
"My heart! Nay in my bosom is no heart,
There's but an urn that holds life's burnt-out ashes;
Have pity on me, thou green mother Earth,
And hide that urn full soon in thy cool breast.
In air it crumbles, moulders; earth's deep woe
Has in the earth, I ween, at last an end;
And Time's poor foundling, here in school constrained,
Finds then, perchance, beyond the sun--a father."
[40] The poem is written in the _ottava rime_, but in order to
preserve the sense intact I have rendered it in blank verse.
A physical disease which seems to have baffled the skill of physicians
may have been the primary cause of the sufferings here described, and
was no doubt aggravated by the psychical condition to which I have
alluded. Now it was supposed to be the liver which was affected; then
again Tegner was treated for gall-stones. In the summer of 1833 he made
a journey through Germany and spent some months at Carlsbad; but he
returned without sensible relief.
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