THE SCULPTURED CHILDREN. How many hearts have felt Your silent beauty melt Their strength to gushing tenderness away! From depths of buried years All freshly bursting, have confessed your sway! How many eyes will shed Still, o'er your marble bed 79 Such drops, from Memory's troubled fountains wrung! While Hope hath blights to bear, While love breathes mortal air, While roses perish ere to glory sprung. Yet, from a voiceless home, To bend and linger o'er your lovely rest; And the soft breathings low Of babes that grew and faded on her breast; If then the dovelike tone Of those faint murmurs gone, And brow and bosom fair, And life, now dust, her soul too deeply yearn; O gentle forms entwined Like tendrils which the wind A still small voice, a sound Of hope, forbidding that lone heart to sink. By all the pure meek mind 80 THE SCULPTURED CHILDREN. By childhood's love-too bright a bloom to die! O'er her worn spirit shed, O fairest, holiest dead! The Faith, Trust, Light, of Immortality! MY OWN FIRESIDE. BY ALARIC A. WATTS. LET others seek for empty joys, 'Twixt book and lute the hours divide; My own Fireside! Those simple words A gentle form is near me now; A small white hand is clasped in mine; I gaze upon her placid brow, And ask what joys can equal thine! A babe, whose beauty's half divine, In sleep its mother's eyes doth hide ;Where may love seek a fitter shrine, Than thou-my own Fireside? MY OWN FIRESIDE. What care I for the sullen roar Of winds without, that ravage earth; It doth but bid me prize the more, The shelter of thy hallowed hearth; To thoughts of quiet bliss give birth: Then let the churlish tempest chide, It cannot check the blameless mirth That glads my own Fireside. My refuge ever from the storm Of this world's passion, strife and care; Thy precincts are a charmed ring, To thee my own Fireside! Shrine of my household deities! Fair scene of my home's unsullied joys! To thee my burthened spirit flies, When fortune frowns, or care annoys : Thine is the bliss that never cloys; The smile whose truth hath oft been tried ; What, then, are this world's tinsel toys To thee-my own Fireside! 81 82 MY OWN FIRESIDE, Oh, may the yearnings, fond and sweet, THE FROSTED TREES. WHAT strange enchantment meets my view, Or am I born to regions new To see the glories there? Last eve when sun-set filled the sky And sleepy mists came down to lie But now the scene is changed, and all The trees, last eve so straight and tall, Are bending on the view, And streams of living daylight fall The silvery arches through. THE FROSTED TREES. The boughs are strung with glittering pearls ! And there they gleam in silvery curls, Like gems of Samarcand, Seeming in wild fantastic whirls The work of fairy land. Each branch stoops meekly with the weight, As if some viewless angel sate Upon its graceful curves, And made the fibres spring elate, Oh! I could dream the robe of heaven, Had come in its stealthy flow, From the sky at silent even, For the morning's glorious show. THE BUGLE. BY GRENVILLE MELLEN. But still the dingle's hollow throat LADY OF THE LAKE. OH! wild enchanting horn! 83 |