Published 1803; written for performance at the Bath concerts. The author of the text was from an influential Somerset family and patron of the arts.

The piece may be performed as a song, or as a dialogue between narration and reported speech.

Lyrics: Thomas Sedgwick Whalley

By Severn, where the waters pour,
To meet the ocean's willowy flood,
Sighing and singing to his roar,
The lovely love-lorn Mary stood,
Dauntless upon a frowning rock,
For what alas! can daunt despair!
She brav'd the rising tempest shock,
With tresses wild and bosom bare.

"Ye furious winds", she frantic cried,
"What are your raging gusts to me;
What all the horror of these rocks,
Of midnight or the bellowing sea?
Light are the terrors to the heart,
Whose madden'd pulse but beats to mourn;
Vain all your perils to the breast
Where hope can never more return.
Descend ye torrents on my head!
Ye lightnings flash! ye thunders roll!
O could your fury give me fear,
Faint were the anguish of my soul.
He's dead! I saw my Henry's corpse,
Peck'd by the seagulls on the shore;
I saw! I shriek'd! I flew, but ah!
The billows burst, 'twas seen no more.
Yet when I view'd his auburn locks,
So drench'd and sanded by the wave,
Yet when I saw his pallid face
How pale! without the pow'r to save;
There will I take my nightly stand
And, raving to the cruel sea, cry:
'Let thy furious billows mount,
And burst and foam and swallow me' ".

The tempest howls, the lightnings break,
The thunders roll, the billows roar;
Loud 'midst the storm I heard her shriek,
Then saw her plunge to rise no more.