Yet comfort still one selfish thought imparts,
We lose the portrait, but preserve our hearts.
What can his vaulted gallery now disclose ?
A garden with all flowers-except the rose ;-
A fount that only wants its living stream;
A night, with every star, save Dian's beam,
Lost to our eyes the present forms shall be,
That turn from tracing them to dream of thee;
And more on that recall'd resemblance pause,
Than all he shall not force on our applause.
Long may thy yet meridian lustre shine,
With all that Virtue asks of Homage thine:
The symmetry of youth, the grace of mien,
The eye that gladdens, and the brow serene;
The glossy darkness of that clustering hair,
Which shades, yet shows that forehead more than fair!
Each glance that wins us, and the life that throws
A spell which will not let our looks repose,
But turn to gaze again, and find anew
Some charm that well rewards another view.
These are not lessen'd, these are still as bright,
Albeit too dazzling for a dotard's sight;
And those must wait till every charm is gone,
To please the paltry heart that pleases none;→→
That dull cold sensualist, whose sickly eye
In envious dimness pass'd thy portrait by ;
Who rack'd his little spirit to combine
It's hate of Freedom's loveliness, and thine.
ON THE DEATH OF SIR PETER PARKER, BART.
THERE is a tear for all that die,
A mourner o'er the humblest grave;
But nations swell the funeral cry,
And triumph weeps above the brave.
For them is Sorrow's purest sigh
O'er Ocean's heaving bosom sent: In vain their bones unburied lie,
All earth becomes their monument !
A tomb is theirs on every page,
An epitaph on every tongue : The present hours, the future age, For them bewail, to them belong.
For them the voice of festal mirth
Grows hush'd, their name the only sound; While deep Remembrance pours to Worth The goblet's tributary round.
A theme to crowds that knew them not,
Lamented by admiring foes,
Who would not share their glorious lot?
Who would not die the death they chose?
And, gallant Parker! thus enshrined
Thy life, thy fall, thy fame shall be; And early valour, glowing find
A model in thy memory.
But there are breasts that bleed with thee
In woe, that glory cannot quell;
And shuddering hear of victory,
Where one so dear, so dauntless, fell.
Where shall they turn to mourn thee less? When cease to hear thy cherish'd name? Time cannot teach forgetfulness,
While Grief's full heart is fed by Fame.
Alas! for them, though not for thee,
They cannot choose but weep the more;
Deep for the dead the grief must be,
Who ne'er gave cause to mourn before.
TO BELSHAZZAR.
BELSHAZZAR! from the banquet turn, Nor in thy sensual fulness fall; Behold! while yet before thee burn The graven words, the glowing wall. Many a despot men miscall
Crown'd and anointed from on high; But thou, the weakest, worst of allIs it not written, thou must die?
Go! dash the roses from thy brow-
Grey hairs but poorly wreath with them;
Youth's garlands misbecome thee now,
More than thy very diadem,
Where thou hast tarnish'd every gem :
Then throw the worthless bauble by, Which, worn by thee, ev'n slaves contemn; And learn like better men to die!
Oh! early in the balance weigh'd,
And ever light of word and worth, Whose soul expired ere youth decay'd, And left thee but a mass of earth. To see thee moves the scorner's mirth: But tears in Hope's averted eye Lament that ever thou hadst birth→ Unfit to govern, live, or die.
STANZAS FOR MUSIC.
THERE be none of Beauty's daughters With a magic like thee;
And like music on the waters
Is thy sweet voice to me : When, as if its sound were causing The charmed ocean's pausing, The waves lie still and gleaming, And the lull'd winds seem dreaming:
And the midnight moon is weaving
Her bright chain o'er the deep; Whose breast is gently heaving, As an infant's asleep: So the spirit bows before thee, To listen and adore thee: With a full but soft emotion, Like the swell of Summer's ocean
'O Lachrymarum fons, tenero sacros
Ducentium ortus ex animo: quater
Felix! in imo qui scatentem
Pectore te, pia Nympha, sensit.'
GRAY'S Poemata.
To look once more into each other's face;
Happy were those who dwelt within the eye
Of the volcanoes, and their mountain-torch:
A fearful hope was all the world contained;
Forests were set on fire-but hour by hour
They fell and faded-and the crackling trunks
The brows of men by the despairing light
THERE'S not a joy the world can give like that it Extinguish'd with a crash-and all was black. takes away,
When the glow of early thought declines in feeling's Wore an unearthly aspect, as by fits duil decay; The flashes fell upon them; some lay down 'Tis not on youth's smooth cheek the blush alone, And hid their eyes and wept; and some did rest which fades so fast, Their chins upon their clenched hands, and smiled;
But the tender bloom of heart is gone, ere youth it- And others hurried to and fro, and fed self be past.
Then the few whose spirits float above the wreck of happiness
Are driven o'er the shoals of guilt or ocean of excess: The magnet of their course is gone, or only points in vain
Their funeral piles with fuel, and look'd up
With mad disquietude on the dull sky,
The pall of a past world; and then again
With curses cast them down upon the dust,
And gnash'd their teeth and howl'd: the wild birds
shriek'd,
The shore to which their shiver'd sail shall never And flap their useless wings; the wildest brutes
And, terrified, did flutter on the ground,
stretch again.
Came tame and tremulous; and vipers crawl'd
Then the mortal coldness of the soul like death itself And twined themselves among the multitude, comes down;
Hissing, but stingless-they were slain for food: It cannot feel for others' woes, it dare not dream its And War, which for a moment was no more, own;
Did glut himself again :-a meal was bought
Gorging himself in gloom: no love was left;
That heavy chill has frozen o'er the fountain of our With blood, and each sate sullenly apart tears, And though the eye may sparkle still, 'tis where the All earth was but one thought-and that was death ice appears.
Though wit may flash from fluent lips, and mirth dis
Through midnight hours that yield no more their former hope of rest;
'Tis but as ivy-leaves around the ruined turret wreath, All green and wildly fresh without, but worn and grey
Immediate and inglorious; and the pang
Of famine fed upon all entrails-men
Died, and their bones were tombless as their flesh;
The meagre by the meagre were devour'd,
Even dogs assail'd their masters, all save one,
And he was faithful to a corse, and kept
The birds and beasts and famish'd men at bay,
Till hunger clung them, or the dropping dead
Lured their lank jaws; himself sought out no food,
And a quick desolate cry, licking the hand
Oh! could I feel as I have felt or be what I have But with a piteous and perpetual moan,
been,
Or weep as I could once have wept, o'er many a Which answered not with a caress-he died.
vanish'd scene;
The crowd was famish'd by degrees; but two
As springs in deserts found seem sweet, all brackish Of an enormous city did survive,
though they be,
And they were enemies: they met beside
So midst the wither'd waste of life, those tears would The dying embers of an altar-place,
flow to me.
Where had been heap'd a mass of holy things
For an unholy usage; they raked up,
I HAD a dream, which was not all a dream,
The bright sun was extinguish'd, and the stars
Did wander darkling in the eternal space,
Rayless, and pathless; and the icy earth
Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air;
Morn came and went-and came, and brought
day,
And men forgot their passions in the dread
And shivering scraped with their cold skeleton hands
The feeble ashes, and their feeble breath
Of this their desolation; and all hearts
Were chill'd into a selfish prayer for light:
And they did live by watchfires-and the thrones,
The palaces of crowned kings-the huts,
The habitations of all things which dwell,
Were burnt for beacons; cities were consumed,
And men were gathered round their blazing homes
Seasonless, herbless, treeless, manless, lifeless,
A lump of death—a chaos of hard clay.
The rivers, lakes, and ocean all stood still,
And nothing stirr'd within their silent depths;
Ships sailorless lay rotting on the sea,
And their masts fell down piecemeal; as they dropp'd,
They slept on the abyss without a surge-
The waves were dead; the tides were in their grave,
The Moon, their mistress, had expired before;
The winds were wither'd in the stagnant air,
And the clouds perish'd; Darkness had no need
Of aid from them-She was the Universe!
MONODY ON THE DEATH
OF THE RIGHT HON. R. B. SHERIDAN.
SPOKEN AT DRURY-LANE THEATRE.
WHEN the last sunshine of expiring day
In summer's twilight weeps itself away,
Who hath not felt the softness of the hour
Sink on the heart, as dew along the flower?
With a pure feeling which absorbs and awes
While nature makes that melancholy pause,
Her breathing moment on the bridge where Time
Of light and darkness forms an arch sublime,
Who hath not shared that calm, so still and deep,
The voiceless thought which would not speak but
A holy concord, and a bright regret,
A glorious sympathy with suns that set?
'Tis not harsh sorrow, but a tenderer woe,
Nameless, but dear to gentle hearts below,
Felt without bitterness, but full and clear,
A sweet dejection, a transparent tear,
Unmix'd with worldly grief or selfish stain,
Shed without shame, and secret without pain.
Even as the tenderness that hour instils
When summer's day declines along the hills,
So feels the fulness of our heart and eyes,
When all of Genius which can perish dies.
A mighty spirit is eclipsed-a power
Hath passed from day to darkness-to whose hour
Of light no likeness is bequeath'd-no name,
Focus at once of all the rays of Fame!
The flash of Wit, the bright Intelligence,
The beam of Song, the blaze of Eloquence,
Set with their Sun, but still have left behind
The enduring produce of immortal Mind;
Fruits of a genial morn, and glorious noon,
A deathless part of him who died too soon.
But small that portion of the wondrous whole,
These sparkling segments of that circling soul,
Which all embraced, and lighten'd over all,
To cheer, to pierce, to please, or to appal.
From the charm'd council to the festive board,
Of human feelings the unbounded lord:
In whose acclaim the loftiest voices vied,
The matchless dialogue, the deathless wit,
Which knew not what it was to intermit;
The glowing portraits, fresh from life, that bring
Home to our hearts the truth from which they
spring;
These wondrous beings of his fancy, wrought
To fulness by the fiat of his thought,
Here in their first abode you still may meet,
Bright with the hues of his Promethean heat;
A halo of the light of other days,
Which still the splendour of its orb betrays.
But should there be to whom the fatal blight Of failing Wisdom yields a base delight, Men who exult when minds of heavenly tone Jar in the music which was born their own, Still let them pause-ah! little do they know That what to them seemed Vice might be but Woe. Hard is his fate on whom the public gaze Is fix'd for ever to detract or praise; Repose denies her requiem to his name, And Folly loves the martyrdom of Fame. The secret enemy whose sleepless eye Stands sentinel, accuser, judge, and spy; The foe, the fool, the jealous, and the vain, The envious, who but breathe in others' painBehold the host! delighting to deprave, Who track the steps of glory to the grave, Watch every fault that daring Genius owes Half to the ardour which its birth bestows, Distort the truth, accumulate the lie, And pile the pyramid of Calumny! These are his portion-but if joined to these Gaunt Poverty should league with deep Disease;
If the high Spirit must forget to soar,
And stoop to strive with Misery at the door,
To soothe Indignity-and face to face
Meet sordid rage, and wrestle with Disgrace;
To find in Hope but the renew'd caress,
The serpent-fold of further Faithlessness:-
If such may be the ills which men assail,
What marvel if at last the mightiest fail?
Breasts to whom all the strength of feeling's given
Bear hearts electric-charged with fire from heaven,
Black with the rude collision, inly torn,
By clouds surrounded, and on whirlwinds borne,
Driven o'er the lowering atmosphere that nurst
Thoughts which have turn'd to thunder-scorch, and
burst.
But far from us and from our mimic scene
The praised, the proud, who made his praise their Such things should be-if such have ever been;
When the loud cry of trampled Hindostan Arose to Heaven in her appeal from man,
His was the thunder, his the avenging rod, The wrath-the delegated voice of God!
Ours be the gentler wish, the kinder task,
To give the tribute Glory need not ask,
To mourn the vanish'd bean, and add our mite
Of praise in payment of a long delight.
Ye Orators! whom yet our councils yield,
Which shook the nations through his lips, and Mourn for the veteran Hero of your field!
The worthy rival of the wondrous Three,
Whose words were sparks of Immortality!
Ye Bards! to whom the Drama's Muse is dear,
He was your master-emulate him here!
Ye men of wit and social eloquence!
He was your brother-bear his ashes hence!
While powers of mind almost of boundless range,
Complete in kind, as various in their change;
While Eloquence, Wit, Poesy, and Mirth,
That humbler Harmonist of care on Earth,
Survive within our souls-while lives our sense
Of pride in Merit's proud pre-eminence,
Long shall we seek his likeness, long in vain,
And turn to all of him which may remain,
Sighing that Nature form'd but one such man,
And broke the die-in moulding Sheridan!
A FACT LITERALLY RENDERED.
I STOOD beside the grave of him who blazed
The comet of a season, and I saw
The humblest of all sepulchres, and gazed
With not the less of sorrow and of awe
On that neglected turf and quiet stone,
With name no clearer than the names unknown,
Which lay unread around it; and I ask'd
The Gardener of that ground, why it might be
That for this plant strangers his memory task'd,
Through the thick deaths of half a century?
And thus he answer'd: Well, I do not know
Why frequent travellers turn to pilgrims so;
He died before my day of Sextonship,
And I had not the digging of this grave.'
And is this all? I thought-and do we rip
The vale of Immortality, and crave
I know not what of honour and of light,
Through unborn ages, to endure this blight,
So soon, and so successless? As I said,
The Architect of all on which we tread,
For Earth is but a tombstone, did essay
To extricate remembrance from the clay,
Whose minglings might confuse a Newton's thought,
Were it not that all life must end in one,
Of which we are but dreamers;--as he caught
As 'twere the twilight of a former Sun,
Thus spoke he: 'I believe the man of whom
You wot, who lies in this selected tomb,
Was a most famous writer in his day,
And therefore travellers step from out their way
To pay him honour, and myself whate'er
Your honour pleases.' Then most pleased I shook
From out my pocket's avaricious nook
Some certain coins of silver, which as 'twere
Perforce I gave this man, though I could spare
So much but inconveniently :-Ye smile,
I see ye, ye profane ones! all the while,
Because my homely phrase the truth would tell.
You are the fools, not I; for I did dwell
With a deep thought, and with a soften'd eye,
On that old Sexton's natural homily,
In which there was Obscurity and Fame-
The glory and the Nothing of a Name.
Seen in their sad reality,
Were not as things that gods despise,
What was thy pity's recompense?
A silent suffering, and intense;
The rock, the vulture, and the chain,
All that the proud can feel of pain,
The agony they do not show,
The suffocating sense of woe,
Which speaks but in its loneliness,
And then is jealous lest the sky
Should have a listener, nor will sigh
Until its voice is echoless.
Titan! to thee the strife was given
Between the suffering and the will,
Which torture where they cannot kill;
And the inexorable Heaven,
And the deaf tyranny of Fate,
The ruling principle of Hate,
Which for its pleasure doth create
The things it may annihilate,
Refused thee even the boon to die:
The wretched gift Eternity
Was thine-and thou hast borne it well.
All that the Thunderer wrung from thee
Was but the menace which flung back
On him the torments of thy rack;
The fate thou didst so well foresee,
But would not to appease him tell;
And in thy Silence was his Sentence,
And in his soul a vain repentance,
And evil dread so ill dissembled,
That in his hand the lightnings trembled.
Thy godlike crime was to be kind,
To render with thy precepts less
The sum of human wretchedness,
And strengthen Man with his own mind;
But baffled as thou wert from high,
Still in thy patient energy,
In the endurance, and repulse
Of thine impenetrable Spirit,
Which Earth and Heaven could not convulse,
A mighty lesson we inherit :
Thou art a symbol and a sign
To mortals of their fate and forc
Like thee Man is in part divine,
A troubled stream from a pure source;
And Man in portions can foresee
His own funereal destiny;
His wretchedness, and his resistance,
And his sad unallied existence:
To which his Spirit may oppose
Itself-and equal to all woes,
And a firm will, and a deep sense,
Which even in torture can descry
Its own concentred recompense, Triumphant where it dares defy, And making Death a Victory!
PROMETHEUS.
TITAN! to whose immortal eyes The sufferings of mortality,
COULD I remount the river of my years,
To the first fountain of our smiles and tears,
I would not trace again the stream of hours
Between their outworn banks of wither'd flowers,
But bid it flow as now-until it glides
Into the number of the nameless tides.
What is this Death?-a quiet of the heart? The whole of that of which we are a part? For life is but a vision-what I see Of all that lives alone is life to me; And being so-the absent are the dead, Who haunt us from tranquillity, and spread A dreary shroud around us, and invest With sad remembrances our hours of rest.
The absent are the dead-for they are cold, And ne'er can be what once we did behold; And they are changed, and cheerless,-or if yet The unforgotten do not all forget, Since thus divided-equal must it be If the deep barrier be of earth, or sea; It may be both-but one day end it must, In the dark union of insensate dust.
The under-earth inhabitants-are they But mingled millions decomposed to clay? The ashes of a thousand ages spread Wherever man has trodden or shall tread? Or do they in their silent cities dwell
Each in his incommunicative cell?
Or have they their own language? and a sense
Of breathless being?-darken'd and intense
As midnight in her solitude?-O Earth!
Where are the past?-and wherefore had they birth? The dead are thy inheritors-and we
But bubbles on thy surface; and the key
Of thy profundity is in the grave,
The ebon portal of thy peopled cave,
Where I would walk in spirit, and behold
Our elements resolved to things untold,
And fathom-hidden wonders, and explore
The essence of great bosoms now no more.
SONNET TO LAKE LEMAN.
ROUSSEAU-Voltaire-our Gibbon-and De Staël-
Leman! these names are worthy of thy shore,*
Thy shore of names like these! wert thou no more,
Their memory thy remembrance would recall:
To them thy banks were lovely as to all,
But they have made them lovelier, for the lore
Of mighty minds doth hallow in the core
Of human hearts the ruin of a wall
Where dwelt the wise and wondrous; but by thee,
How much more, Lake of Beauty! do we feel,
In sweetly gliding o'er thy crystal sea,
The wild glow of that not ungentle zeal,
Which of the heirs of immortality
Is proud, and makes the breath of glory real!
Geneva, Ferney, Copet, Lausanne.
ON THE SIEGE AND CONQUEST OF ALHAMA, Which, in the Arabic language, is to the following purport.
THE Moorish King rides up and down
Through Granada's royal town;
From Elvira's gates to those
Of Bivarambla on he goes.
Woe is me, Alhama!
Letters to the monarch tell
How Alhama's city fell:
In the fire the scroll he threw,
And the messenger he slew.
Woe is me, Alhama!
He quits his mule, and mounts his horse. And through the street directs his course; Through the street of Zacatin
To the Alhambra spurring in.
Woe is me, Alhama!
When the Alhambra walls he gain'd,
On the moment he ordain'd
That the trumpet straight should sound
With the silver clarion round.
Woe is me, Alhama!
And when the hollow drums of war
Beat the loud alarm afar,
That the Moors of town and plain
Might answer to the martial strain.
Woe is me, Alhama!
Then the Moors, by this aware
That bloody Mars recall'd them there,
One by one, and two by two,
To a mighty squadron grew.
Woe is me, Alhama!
Out then spake an aged Moor
In these words the king before.
'Wherefore call on us, O King?
What may mean this gathering?
Woe is me, Alhama!
'Friends. ye have, alas ! to know
Of a most disastrous blow;
That the Christians, stern and bold,
Have obtain'd Alhama's hold.'
Woe is me, Alhama!
Out then spake old Alfaqui,
With his beard so white to see:
'Good King! thou art justly served,
Good King! this thou hast deserved.
Woe is me, Alhama!
'By thee were slain, in evil hour,
The Abencerrage, Granada's flower;
And strangers were received by thee
Of Cordova the Chivalry.
Woe is me, Alhama!
And for this, O King! is sent
On thee a double chastisement;
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