The Story
of Saville
XV.
Each century hath, it is said, its peculiar favorite sin,
A chamber of horrors so grewsome and dank no poet may dwell therein,
But the special crime of this passing day touches us all so near
We cannot therefrom withdraw our eyes however they widen with fear,—
The journals will spare no details of the suicide’s act and its cause,
The plunge or the bane or the bullet—Why may not the people have laws
To defend them from hearing these blasts of hell? O tribunes and senators! pause
In your framing dispensable edicts, smoothing scarce-visible flaws,
And forbid the monsters black-blooded and huge to mangle these gouts in their maws!
Saville heard her sentence of death, she felt, in hearing the surgeon say
The bandage should fall and the curtains be drawn on the first sweet morning of May,
A year ago—how the robins had sung!—it had been their wedding day!
