’T was ever thus from childhood’s hour! My fondest hopes would not decay:
I never loved a tree or flower Which was the first to fade away.

My hopes were all dead — - struck with a subtle doom, such as, in one night, fell on all the first-born in the land of Egypt. I looked on my cherished wishes, yesterday so blooming and glowing; they lay stark, chill, livid corpses that could never revive. I looked at my love: that feeling which had been my master's — - which he had created; it shivered in my heart, like a suffering child in a cold cradle; sickness and anguish had seized it; it could not seek Mr Rochester's arms — - it could not derive warmth from his breast. Oh, never more could it turn to him; for faith was blighted — confidence destroyed!

The garlands fade, the vows are worn away; So dies her love, and so my hopes decay.

Passing thus with time away,
The sweet gifts of youth decay ;
Fleet their blooms, thus one by one,
Till their very form is gone ;
Memory left but to declare
How beautiful and sweet they were!
In the first blue noon of Spring,
Who can think on withering?

"I've lived to see my longings die"

I've lived to se my longings die:
My dreams and I have grown apart;
Now only sorrow haunts my eye,
The wages of a bitter heart.

Beneath the storms of hostile fate,
My flowery wreath has faded fast;
I live alone and sadly wait
To see when death will come at last.

Just so, when the winds in winter moan
And snow descends in frigid flakes,
Upon a naked branch, alone,
The final leaf of summer shakes!

I've lived to see my longings die

I've lived to see my longings die:
My dreams and I have grown apart;
Now only sorrow haunts my eye,
The wages of a bitter heart.

Beneath the storms of hostile fate,
My flowery wreath has faded fast;
I live alone and sadly wait
To see when death will come at last.

Just so, when the winds in winter moan
And snow descends in frigid flakes,
Upon a naked branch, alone,
The final leaf of summer shakes!...

The garlands fade that Spring so lately wove, Each simple flower, which she had nurs’d in dew,
Anemonies that spangled every grove, The primrose wan, and hare-bell, mildly blue.
No more shall violets linger in the dell, Or purple orchis variegate the plain,
Till Spring again shall call forth every bell, And dress with humid hands, her wreaths again.
Ah! poor humanity! so frail, so fair, Are the fond visions of thy early day,
Till tyrant passion, and corrosive care, Bid all thy fairy colours fade away!
Another May new buds and flowers shall bring;
Ah! why has happiness—no second spring?

How I pity those whose childhood has been unhappy! to them one of the sweetest springs of feeling has been utterly denied, the most green and beautiful part of life laid waste.

In the last spring I ever knew,
In those last days,
I sat in the forsaken orchard
Where beyond fields of greenery shimmered
The hills at Miller's Ford;
Just to muse on the apple tree
With its ruined trunk and blasted branches,
And shoots of green whose delicate blossoms
Were sprinkled over the skeleton tangle,
Never to grow in fruit.
And there was I with my spirit girded
By the flesh half dead, the senses numb,
Yet thinking of youth and the earth in youth,-
Such phantom blossoms palely shining
Over the lifeless boughs of Time.
O earth that leaves us ere heaven takes us!
Had I been only a tree to shiver
With dreams of spring and a leafy youth,
Then I had fallen in the cyclone
Which swept me out of the soul's suspense
Where it's neither earth nor heaven.

First melted off the hope of youth Then Fancy's rainbow fast withdrew And then experience told me truth In mortal bosoms never grew 'Twas grief enough to think mankind All hollow servile insincere But worse to trust to my own mind And find the same corruption there

The worst was this: my love was my decay.

Youth fades, love droops, the leaves of friendship fall; A mother's secret hope outlives them all.

O I never thought that joys would run away from boys,
Or that boys would change their minds and forsake such summer joys;
But alack I never dreamed that the world had other toys
To petrify first feelings like the fable into stone,
Till I found the pleasure past and a winter come at last,
Then the fields were sudden bare and the sky got overcast
And boyhood’s pleasing haunt like a blossom in the blast
Was shrivelled to a withered weed and trampled down and done,
Till vanished was the morning spring and set the summer sun
And winter fought her battle strife and won.

I've witnessed, incognito, the gradual collapse of my life, the slow foundering of all I wanted to be. I can say, with a truth that needs no flowers to show it's dead, that there's nothing I've wanted - and nothing in which I've placed, even for a moment, the dream of only that moment - that hasn't disintegrated below my windows like a clod of dirt that resembled stone until it fell from a flowerpot on a high balcony. It would even seem that Fate has always tried to make me love or want things just so that it could show me, on the very next day, that I didn't have and could never have them.