Medicus-magus, : a poem, in three cantos; with a glossary. / by Richard Furness.

  • Richard Furness
Date:
1836
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Medicus-magus, : a poem, in three cantos; with a glossary. / by Richard Furness. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    39/80 (page 35)
    For cliff and crag were demons of the night. The future world seem’d open to his sight; In Raven-tor* the nestlings croak’d aloud, Death seem’d awaking from his silent shroud ; For now, the Scotsman-]- issued from the cave Of Caelswark dark, his sepulchre and grave ; Throat cut; a gory, gaping, ghastly corse, Which pass’d him dangling on the murderer’s horse ; While to his eye Rock-Gardens seem’d to blaze, And Lovers’-LeapJ was seen through rudy haze : * A perpendicular rock in Eyam Dale, in the top of which is a cavity, the aviary of ravens, owls, and other carnivorous birds. f About half a century since, a skeleton was discovered in this cavern, said to belong to a Scotch pedlar who frequented the Derbyshire Wakes with jewellery. No- thing satisfactory was ever elicited as to the means by which his body was deposited in this cavern. Tradi- tion states that he was murdered, the body laid across a horse, and carried into this dismal receptacle by the mur- derers, who were met by some miners, whom the horrible spectable so terrified as to unfit them for a correct relation of what they had seen. X Lovers Leap is a high rock at the eastern entrance of Middleton Dale ; from the summit of which a despair- ing damsel took a similar leap to that of the celebrated Lady of Lesbos. Our modern Sappho, a native of Stony Mid- dleton ; like her prototype, finding her dear Phaon inexor- able, threw herself from this precipice ; fortunately, her dress forming a sort of parachute, she sustained little in- jury. It was the opinion of the ancients, that all those who threw themselves from the promontory of Leucate, and were taken up alive, found themselves rid of their passion : so it seems a good sousing in the Leucadian sea quenched their flames; our desperate heroine, Miss Baggaley, found hers completely quenched in a dry saw-pit.