Penny Dreadfuls, 1812 · page 232 of 258
Psyche, and other poems — page 232: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
# Page 214 of a Victorian Penny Dreadful This is a text page containing running verse—specifically dramatic poetry or verse narrative, not illustrated content. The passage depicts an intensely melodramatic scene of grief and loss: a narrator witnesses the death of his son from wounds, his wife's collapse and subsequent descent into madness, and the deaths of his children. The surviving speaker, haunted by these horrors, is then called away by an orphaned child described as the "last relic of our hope." The rhetoric emphasizes emotional extremity—despair, convulsion, frenzied eyes, and gushing wounds—typical of Victorian sensation literature's appeal to pathos and sensationalism.
📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)
Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
214. ** Oh, sight of horror, sight of woe ! The dead and dying both were there : One dreadful moment served to show, For us was nothing but despair. *© Oh, God! even now methinks I see My dying boy, as there he stood, And sought with fond anxiety To hide his gushing wounds of blood, ** Ere life yet left his noble breast, Gasping, again he tried to speak, And twice my hand he feebly pressed, And feebly kissed poor Ellen’s cheek. “¢ No word she spoke, no tear she shed, Ere at my feet convulsed she fell, Still lay my children, cold and dead ! And I yet live, the tale to tell! ‘‘ She too awoke to wild despair — With frenzied_eye each corse to see, To rave, to smile with frantic air; But never more to smile for me! * But hold! from yonder grassy slope Our orphan darling calls me hence; Sweet child, last relic of our hope, Of love and injured innocence, Comichbooksneom