Where sounds each anthem, but the human tongue,
And nature blooms unrivalled but unsung.

Oh yes! in future days our Western lyres,
Turned to new themes, shall glow with purer fires,
Clothed with the charms to grace their later rhyme,
Of every former age and foreign clime.

Haste happy times, when through these wide domains
Shall sound the concert of harmonious strains;
Through all the clime the softening notes be spread,
Sung in each grove, and in each hamlet read.
Fair maids shall sigh, and youthful heroes glow,
At songs of valor and at tales of woe;
While the rapt poet strikes, along his lyre,
The virgin's beauty and the warrior's fire.
Thus each successive age surpass the old,
With happier bards to hail it than foretold,
While Poesy's star shall, like the circling sun,
Its orbit finish where it first begun.

-Phi Beta Kappa Poem, 1812.

This poem, written at eighteen, certainly gave promise that Everett's name might stand high on the list of American poets. This promise was never fulfilled. He wrote little verse; though one poem, Alaric the Visigoth, makes good his claim to rank among the poets in our English tongue. The poem is founded upon a passage in an old chronicle, which reads: "Towards the close of this year, 410, while engaged in the siege of Cosentia, Alaric was seized with an illness which proved fatal after a very short duration. He was buried, with his treasures, in the bed of the river Busentinus, which was diverted from its channel for that purpose, and all the prisoners who were engaged in the work were put to death, in order that the place of his sepulchre might remain unknown."

ALARIC THE VISIGOTH.

When I am dead, no pageant train
Shall waste their sorrows at my bier,
Nor worthless pomp of homage vain
Stain it with hypocritic tear;
For I will die as I did live,
Nor take the boon I cannot give.

Ye shall not raise a marble bust
Upon the spot where I repose;
Ye shall not fawn before my dust,

In hollow circumstance of woes;
Nor sculptured clay, with lying breath,
Insult the clay that moulds beneath.

Ye shall not pile with servile toil,
Your monuments upon my breast,
Nor yet within the common soil

Lay down the wreck of power to rest, Where man can boast that he has trod On him that was "The Scourge of God."

But ye the mountain stream shall turn,
And lay its secret channel bare,
And hollow, for your sovereign's urn,
A resting-place forever there:
Then bid its everlasting springs
Flow back upon the King of kings;
And never be the secret said
Until the deep gives up its dead.

My gold and silver ye shall fling

Back to the clods that gave them birth—

The captured crowns of many a king,
The ransom of a conquered earth:
For e'en though dead will I control
The trophies of the Capitol.

But when beneath the mountain tide

Ye've laid your monarch down to rot,

BURIAL OF ALARIC.

And hollow, for your sovereign's urn,
A resting-place forever there."

"But ye the mountain stream shall turn And lay its secret channel hare,

Ye shall not rear upon its side

Pillar or mound to mark the spot: For long enough the earth has shook Beneath the terrors of my look ; And now that I have run my race, The astonished realms shall rest a space.

My course was like a river deep,

And from the Northern hills I burst, Across the world in wrath to sweep;

And where I went the spot was curst:
No blade of grass again was seen
Where Alaric and his hosts had been.

See how their haughty barriers fail
Beneath the terror of the Goth!
Their iron-breasted legions quail
Before my ruthless sabaoth,
And low the queen of empires kneels,
And grovels at my chariot-wheels.

Not for myself did I ascend

In judgment my triumphal car;
'Twas God alone on high did send
The avenging Scythian to the war,
To shake abroad, with iron hand,
The appointed scourge of his command.

With iron hand that scourge I reared
O'er guilty king and guilty realm;
Destruction was the ship I steered,

And Vengeance sat upon the helm.
When launched in fury on the flood,
I ploughed my way through seas of blood,
And in the stream their hearts had spilt,
Washed out the long arrears of guilt.

Across the everlasting Alp

I poured the torrent of my powers, And feeble Cæsars shrieked for help

In vain within their seven-hilled towers. I quenched in blood the brightest gem That glittered in their diadem;