They conquered-but Bozzaris fell, His few surviving comrades saw His smile when rang their proud hurrah, And the red field was won; Then saw in death his eyelids close Like flowers at set of sun. Come to the bridal-chamber, Death! That close the pestilence are broke, With banquet-song, and dance and wine; And thou art terrible-the tear, The groan, the knell, the pall, the bier; Of agony, are thine. But to the hero, when his sword Has won the battle for the free, The thanks of millions yet to be. Of sky and stars to prisoned men: Thy summons welcome as the cry To the world-seeking Genoese, When the land wind, from woods of palm, And orange-groves, and fields of balm, Blew o'er the Haytian seas. Bozzaris! with the storied brave Greece nurtured in her glory's time, Rest thee-there is no prouder grave, Even in her own proud clime. She wore no funeral-weeds for thee, Nor bade the dark hearse wave its plume Like torn branch from death's leafless tree In sorrow's pomp and pageantry, The heartless luxury of the tomb: But she remembers thee as one Long loved and for a season gone; For thee her poet's lyre is wreathed, Her marble wrought, her music breathed; For thee she rings the birthday bells; Of thee her babes's first lisping tells; For thine her evening prayer is said At palace-couch and cottage-bed; Her soldier, closing with the foe, Gives for thy sake a deadlier blow; His plighted maiden, when she fears For him the joy of her young years, Thinks of thy fate, and checks her tears: And she, the mother of thy boys, Though in her eye and faded cheek Is read the grief she will not speak, The memory of her buried joys, And even she who gave thee birth, Will, by their pilgrim-circled hearth, Talk of thy doom without a sigh: For thou art Freedom's now, and Fame's; One of the few, the immortal names, That were not born to die. BURNS. WILD Rose of Alloway! my thanks; Thou 'mindst me of that autumn noon When first we met upon "the banks Like thine, beneath the thorn-tree's bough, And will not thy death-doom be mine The doom of all things wrought of clayAnd withered my life's leaf like thine, Wild rose of Alloway? Not so his memory, for whose sake My bosom bore thee far and long, The memory of Burns-a name That calls, when brimmed her festal cup, A nation's glory and her shame, In silent sadness up. A nation's glory-be the rest Forgot-she's canonized his mind; And it is joy to speak the best We may of human kind. I've stood beside the cottage-bed Where the Bard-peasant first drew breath; A straw-thatched roof above his head, A straw-wrought couch beneath. And I have stood beside the pile, His monument-that tells to Heaven Bid thy thoughts hover o'er that spot, The pride that lifted Burns from earth, The rich, the brave, the strong; And if despondency weigh down There have been loftier themes than his, Purer and holier fires: Yet read the names that know not death; His is that language of the heart, In which the answering heart would speak, Thought, word, that bids the warm tear start, Or the smile light the cheek; And his that music, to whose tone The common pulse of man keeps time, |