Contents -BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, ed. Poems of Places: An Anthology in 31 Volumes.
America: Vols. XXV–XXIX. 1876–79.

New England: Newport, R. I.

A Newport Romance

By Bret Harte (1836–1902)

THEY say that she died of a broken heart

(I tell the tale as ’t was told to me);

But her spirit lives, and her soul is part

Of this sad old house by the sea.

Her lover was fickle and fine and French:

It was nearly a hundred years ago

When he sailed away from her arms—poor wench—

With the Admiral Rochambeau.

I marvel much what periwigged phrase

Won the heart of this sentimental Quaker,

At what golden-laced speech of those modish days

She listened—the mischief take her!

But she kept the posies of mignonette

That he gave; and ever as their bloom failed

And faded (though with her tears still wet)

Her youth with their own exhaled.

Till one night, when the sea-fog wrapped a shroud

Round spar and spire and tarn and tree,

Her soul went up on that lifted cloud

From this sad old house by the sea.

And ever since then, when the clock strikes two,

She walks unbidden from room to room,

And the air is filled that she passes through

With a subtle, sad perfume.

The delicate odor of mignonette,

The ghost of a dead and gone bouquet,

Is all that tells of her story; yet

Could she think of a sweeter way?

I sit in the sad old house to-night,—

Myself a ghost from a farther sea;

And I trust that this Quaker woman might,

In courtesy, visit me.

For the laugh is fled from porch and lawn,

And the bugle died from the fort on the hill,

And the twitter of girls on the stairs is gone,

And the grand piano is still.

Somewhere in the darkness a clock strikes two;

And there is no sound in the sad old house,

But the long veranda dripping with dew,

And in the wainscot a mouse.

The light of my study-lamp streams out

From the library door, but has gone astray

In the depths of the darkened hall. Small doubt

But the Quakeress knows the way.

Was it the trick of a sense o’erwrought

With outward watching and inward fret?

But I swear that the air just now was fraught

With the odor of mignonette!

I open the window, and seem almost—

So still lies the ocean—to hear the beat

Of its Great Gulf artery off the coast,

And to bask in its tropic heat.

In my neighbor’s windows the gas-lights flare,

As the dancers swing in a waltz of Strauss;

And I wonder now could I fit that air

To the song of this sad old house.

And no odor of mignonette there is

But the breath of morn on the dewy lawn;

And mayhap from causes as slight as this

The quaint old legend is born.

But the soul of that subtle, sad perfume,

As the spiced embalmings, they say, outlast

The mummy laid in his rocky tomb,

Awakens my buried past.

And I think of the passion that shook my youth,

Of its aimless loves and its idle pains,

And am thankful now for the certain truth

That only the sweet remains.

And I hear no rustle of stiff brocade,

And I see no face at my library door;

For now that the ghosts of my heart are laid,

She is viewless forevermore.

But whether she came as a faint perfume,

Or whether a spirit in stole of white,

I feel, as I pass from the darkened room,

She has been with my soul to-night!