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Product Description
This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1876 edition. Excerpt: ... For all the blooming flush of life is fled. All but yon widowed, solitary thing, That feebly bends beside the plashy spring; 130 She, wretched matron--forced in age, for bread, To strip the brook with mantling cresses spread, To pick her wintry fagot from the thorn, To seek her nightly shed, and weep till morn--She only left of all the harmless train, 135 The sad historian of the pensive plain! Near yonder copse, where once the garden smiled, And still where many a garden flower grows wild; There, where a few torn shrubs the place disclose, The village preacher's modest mansion rose. 140 130 Plasny, onomatopoeic (114) in allusion to the splashing of the water. 132 Mantling-, covering as with a mantle. A very happily chosen word. Cf. Shakespeare, 'King Lear,' ni. iv. 139. 'The green mantle of the standing pond,' which probably refers, not to cresses, but duckweed. cresse. water-cress, which always flourishes best in running streams, though it is also found in stagnant pools. 133 Fag-rot, a bundle of sticks for fire-wood. 135 She only, the only one left of all the inhabitants; all the rest had gone. A picture of complete desolation, but of course an extravagant one; such as probably never did and never can occur in either England or Ireland. 136 Historian, one who tells a history or story, pensive plain, causing sadness to the beholder. 137 Copse, contraction oi coppice; a plantation of small trees; wood cut at stated times for fuel: probably derived from the Greek kopto (or its cognate), to cut. 138 many a (19) garden flower grows wild, because the cottages were deserted and the gardens neglected. 139 IMsclose, show where it used to be. 140 Modest, simple, unpretending, mansion, from the Lat maneo, mansum, to stay, now used only of a large,...
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