This etext was prepared by Donald Lainson, charlie@idirect.com.




LUCILE

by Owen Meredith




"Why, let the stricken deer go weep.
The hart ungalled play:
For some must watch, while some must sleep;
Thus runs the world away."

Hamlet.




DEDICATION.

TO MY FATHER.


I dedicate to you a work, which is submitted to the public with a
diffidence and hesitation proportioned to the novelty of the effort
it represents. For in this poem I have abandoned those forms of
verse with which I had most familiarized my thoughts, and have
endeavored to follow a path on which I could discover no footprints
before me, either to guide or to warn.

There is a moment of profound discouragement which succeeds to
prolonged effort; when, the labor which has become a habit having
ceased, we miss the sustaining sense of its companionship, and
stand, with a feeling of strangeness and embarrassment, before the
abrupt and naked result. As regards myself, in the present
instance, the force of all such sensations is increased by the
circumstances to which I have referred. And in this moment of
discouragement and doubt, my heart instinctively turns to you, from
whom it has so often sought, from whom it has never failed to
receive, support.

I do not inscribe to you this book because it contains anything
that is worthy of the beloved and honored name with which I thus
seek to associate it; nor yet because I would avail myself of a
vulgar pretext to display in public an affection that is best
honored by the silence which it renders sacred.

Feelings only such as those with which, in days when there existed
for me no critic less gentle than yourself, I brought to you my
childish manuscripts; feelings only such as those which have, in
later years, associated with your heart all that has moved or
occupied my own,--lead me once more to seek assurance from the
grasp of that hand which has hitherto been my guide and comfort
through the life I owe to you.

And as in childhood, when existence had no toil beyond the day's
simple lesson, no ambition beyond the neighboring approval of the
night, I brought to you the morning's task for the evening's
sanction, so now I bring to you this self-appointed taskwork of
maturer years; less confident indeed of your approval, but not less
confident of your love; and anxious only to realize your presence
between myself and the public, and to mingle with those severer
voices to whose final sentence I submit my work the beloved and
gracious accents of your own.

OWEN MEREDITH.




LUCILE