Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, ed. Poems of Places: An Anthology in 31 Volumes.
England: Vols. I–IV. 1876–79.
The Sisters of Glen Nectan
By Robert Stephen Hawker (18031875)
I
The foamy waters flash and leap;
It is where shrinking wild-flowers grow
They lave the nymph that dwells below.
The reliques of a human cell,
Where the sad stream and lonely wind
Bring man no tidings of his kind?
’T was told him by his grandsire dead,—
“One day two ancient sisters came;
None there could tell their race or name.
Their garb had signs of loftier days;
Slight food they took from hands of men,
They withered slowly in that glen.
Gushed till the fount of tears was dry;
A wild and withering thought had she,
‘I shall have none to weep for me.’
Bent in the shape wherein she passed,
Where her lone seat long used to stand,
Her head upon her shrivelled hand.”
The grandame’s tale for winter hearth?
Or some dead bard, by Nectan’s stream,
People these banks with such a dream?
To think such wild things here have been:
What spot more meet could grief or sin
Choose, at the last, to wither in?