(D.) — The Sisters of Glen-Neot
By the Rev. R. S. Hawker of Morwenstow
It is from Neot’s sainted steep
The foamy waters flash and leap;
It is where shrinking wild-flowers grow,
They lave the nymph that dwells below!
But wherefore in this far-off dell,
The reliques of a human cell?
Where the sad stream and lonely wind
Bring Man no tidings of their kind!
Long years agone! the old man said,
’Twas told him by his grandsire dead,
One day two ancient sisters came,
None there could tell their race or name.
Their speech was not in Cornish phrase,
Their garb had marks of loftier days;
Slight food they took from hands of men,
They wither’d slowly in that glen.
One died! the other’s shrunken eye
Gush’d till the fount of tears was dry;
A wild and wasting thought had she—
“I shall have none to weep for me!”
They found her silent at the last,
Bent in the shape wherein she pass’d—
Where her lone seat long used to stand,
Her head upon her shrivell’d hand!
Did fancy give this legend birth?
The grandame’s tale for winter-hearth,
Or some dead bard, by Neot’s stream,
People these banks with such a dream?
We know not! but it suits the scene,
To think such wild things here have been;
What spot more meet could grief or sin
Choose at the last to wither in?
Echoes of Old Cornwall.
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