ON THE SNUFF-BOX BEQUEATHED TO HER BY
LADY, reject the gift! 'tis tinged with gore!
Those crimson spots a dreadful tale relate:
It has been grasped by an infernal Power;
And by that hand which sealed young Enghien's fate.
Lady, reject the gift; beneath its lid
Discord, and Slaughter, and relentless War, With every plague to wretched man lie hid Let not these loose to range the world afar.
Say, what congenial to his heart of stone,
In thy soft bosom could the Tyrant trace? When does the dove the eagle's friendship own, Or the wolf hold the lamb in pure embrace?
Think of that pile, to Addison so dear,
Where Sully feasted, and where Rogers' song Still adds sweet music to the perfumed air,
And gently leads each Grace and Muse along.
Pollute not, then, these scenes the gift destroy: "Twill scare the Dryads from that lovely shade; With them will fly all rural peace and joy,
And screaming fiends their verdant haunts invade.
That mystic Box hath magic power to raise
Spectres of myriads slain, a ghastly band;
They'll vex thy slumbers, cloud thy sunny days,
Starting from Moscow's snows or Egypt's sand.
And ye who, bound in Verdun's treacherous chains,
Slow pined to death beneath a base control,
Say, shall not all abhor, where Freedom reigns,
That petty vengeance of a little soul?
The warning Muse no idle trifler deem:
Plunge the cursed mischief in wide Ocean's flood;
Or give it to our own majestic stream-
The only stream he could not dye with blood.
ON THE DEATH OF THE POET KEATS.
AND art thou dead? Thou very sweetest bird
That ever made a moonlight forest ring!
Its wild unearthly music mellowing!
Shall thy rich notes no more, no more be heard?
Never! Thy beautiful romantic themes,
That made it mental heaven to hear thee sing,
Lapping the enchanted soul in golden dreams,
Are mute! Ah! vainly did Italia fling
Her healing ray around thee-blossoming
With blushing flowers, long wedded to thy verse!
Those flowers, those sunbeams, but adorn thy hearse; And the warm gales, that faintly rise and fall,
In music's clime-themselves so musical,
Shall chaunt the minstrel's dirge far from his father's hall.
O, Fare thee well! the bitter hour is past,
And the dread conflict of my fate is o'er;
Of thy loved voice mine ear hath heard its last,
And thy bright form I now may see no more.
Yet wilt thou sigh for days for ever gone,
When hope was young, and mutual faith secure; And thy pale cheek that inward smart shall own, Which thy false bosom must, perforce, endure.
The frown of friends estranged,-Hate's pointed sneer,Untempted Virtue's pharisaic scorn,
All that an erring heart could feel or fear,
Hath mine almost without a murmur borne.
For thou wert all my lonely hope and pride,-
My polar star when sorrow darkly frowned!—
On thy loved breast life's darkest ills defied,
I nestled safe from storms that raged around.
The lonely shepherd, by his native stream,
Sees a young wave along its surface gliding,—
Now sparkling in the summer's genial beam,
And now amid the shady willows hiding ;-
Till sudden down the cataract's headlong steep,
Hurled 'mid the mass of waters' deafening roar,
It bounds to the vast chasm, gloomy and deep,
Sparkles, to spray, shines and is seen no more!
I am that wave, and thus it fares with me!
Ruined and lost, what more have I to tell!
What but to offer from my heart to thee,
Its warmest prayer, in one wild word,-FAREWELL !
SAD city of the silent place!
Queen of the dreary wilderness,
No voice of life, no passing sound
Disturbs thy dreadful calm around;
Save the wild desert-dweller's roar,
Which tells the reign of man is o'er,
Or winds that through thy portals sigh
Upon their night course flitting by!
The' eternal ruins frowning stand,
Like giant spectres of the land;
Or o'er the dead like mourners hang,
Bent down by speechless sorrow's pang;
Where time, and space, and loneliness,
All, o'er the saddened spirit press,
Around in leaden slumbers lie
The dread wastes of infinity,
Where not a gentle hill doth swell,
Where not a hermit shrub doth dwell;
And where the song of wandering flood
Ne'er voiced the fearful solitude.
How sweetly sad our pensive tears
Flow o'er each broken arch that rears
Its grey head through the mists of years!
And where are now the dreams of Fame,
The promise of a deathless name?
Alas! the deep delusion's gone!
And all, except the mouldering stone,
The wreath that decked the victor's hair,
Hath, like his glory, withered there.
And Time's immortal garlands twine
O'er desolation's mournful shrine,
Like youth's embrace around decline.
O'er Beauty's dark and desert bed
Ages of dreamless sleep have fled,
And in the domes where once she smiled,
The whispering weeds are waving wild;
The prince's court is the' jackall's lair,
He peep's through Time's cold windows there;
Broken the harp, and all unstrung,
Perished the strains the minstrel sung.
The moss of ages is their pall,
And dull oblivion hides them all!
Yet there, though now no mortal eye
Looks forth upon the earth and sky,
The evening star steals out as mild,
Above the lone and mighty wild,
As when young lovers hailed its light,
Far in the dark-blue fields of night;
And dews as brightly gem the ground,
As when a garden smiled around.
Go read thy fate, thou thing of clay,
In wrecks of ages rolled away;
Read it in this dread book of doom,
A city crumbled to a tomb!
Where the lorn remnants of the past
Shed deeper sadness o'er the waste,
Where Melancholy breathes her spell,
And chroniclers of ruin dwell.
Constable's Edinburgh Magazine.
ON THE BLINDNESS OF MILTON.
WHEN Milton's eye ethereal lights first drew,
Earth's gross and cumberous objects checked his view;—
Quick, to remove these barriers from his mind,
Nature threw wide the' expanse and struck him blind.
To him a nobler vision then was given !-
He closed his eyes on earth, to look on heaven!
Brighton Gazette.
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