The Consumptive Author:Gertrude Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: While tracing each prophetic sign, That marked her, dread Consumption, thine. Oh ! ye who weep some loved one dead, Upon whose cheek the rose once spread, ... more »While death upon the vitals fed, Our tears together we might shed. THE DELUSION. 11 And reason's self shall bow the knee To shadows and delusions here." The Waif. There came a time that tempted hope, And chased our fears awhile away : Disease seemed narrowing its scope, And Death himself was kept at bay. The merry laugh rang out its peal, The step went more elastic by ; And my glad heart began to feel, Perhaps, perhaps, she will not die ! Alas ! for phantom joy like this. 'T was but Consumption's mockery ; To make the transit back from bliss, A more heart rending agony. Like the great arch-deceiver's schemes, Who lifts his victim high, o'er all, To revel in a meteor's beams, And make more terrible his fall. And the Autumn came, that sweetly pensive, mournful season, when falling leaves, and withering flowers, and fading fields remind us all so forcibly of our own, inevitable mortality. But the consumptive, did she see in these monitors of nature, the semblance of her own impending doom ? Ah, no: how could she think of death, to whom life was just opening the exhaustless garnerof its richest sweets ? Still hopeful, as in the first, fresh morning of her bride- hood, she saw only in the far, blue distance, a glittering succession of glowing summers and golden to-morrows. Even though it had been intimated to her, that disease was within her frame, and how important extreme prudence and carefulness were on her part, she seemed never to suspect the character of that disease, or to once dream of its fatal termination. Many an Autumn evening have we sat beside her, around the cheerful...« less