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Where Life crowds hurrying to the haggard Fates,
And Age upon his mound of ashes waits

To chill our fiery dreams,

Hot from the heart of youth plunged in his icy streams?

Leave me not fading in these weeds of care,

Whose flowers are silvered hair!

Have I not loved thee long,

Though my young lips have often done thee wrong, And vexed thy heaven-tuned ear with careless song?

Ah, wilt thou yet return,

Bearing thy rose-hued torch, and bid thine altar burn?

Come to me!

I will flood thy silent shrine

With my soul's sacred wine,

And heap thy marble floors

As the wild spice-trees waste their fragrant stores

In leafy islands walled with madrepores

And lapped in Orient seas,

When all their feathery palms toss, plume-like, in the breeze.

Come to me!

thou shalt feed on honeyed words,

Sweeter than song of birds;

No wailing bulbul's throat,

No melting dulcimer's melodious note,

When o'er the midnight wave its murmurs float,

Thy ravished sense might soothe

With flow so liquid-soft, with strain so velvet-smooth.

Thou shalt be decked with jewels, like a queen,

Sought in those bowers of green

Where loop the clustered vines

And the close-clinging dulcamara * twines, —

Pure pearls of Maydew where the moonlight shines,

* The "bitter-sweet" of New England is the Celastrus scandens,-"Bourreau des arbres" of the Canadian French.

And Summer's fruited gems,

And coral pendants shorn from Autumn's berried

stems.

Sit by me drifting on the sleepy waves,
Or stretched by grass-grown graves,

Whose gray, high-shouldered stones,

Carved with old names Life's time-worn roll disowns, Lean, lichen-spotted, o'er the crumbled bones

Still slumbering where they lay

While the sad Pilgrim watched to scare the wolf away.

Spread o'er my couch thy visionary wing!

Still let me dream and sing,

Dream of that winding shore

Where scarlet cardinals bloom for me no more,

The stream with heaven beneath its liquid floor,

And clustering nenuphars

Sprinkling its mirrored blue like golden-chaliced stars!

Come while their balms the linden-blossoms shed!—

Come while the rose is red,

While blue-eyed Summer smiles

On the green ripples round yon sunken piles

Washed by the moon-wave warm from Indian isles,

And on the sultry air

The chestnuts spread their palms like holy men in

prayer!

O for thy burning lips to fire my brain
With thrills of wild, sweet pain! —

On life's autumnal blast,

Like shrivelled leaves, youth's passion-flowers are cast,Once loving thee, we love thee to the last!

Behold thy new-decked shrine,

And hear once more the voice that breathed "Forever

thine!"

THE VOICELESS.

WE count the broken lyres that rest

Where the sweet wailing singers slumber,

But o'er their silent sister's breast

The wild-flowers who will stoop to number?

A few can touch the magic string,

And noisy Fame is proud to win them ;

Alas for those that never sing,

But die with all their music in them!

Nay, grieve not for the dead alone

Whose song has told their hearts' sad story, – Weep for the voiceless, who have known

The cross without the crown of glory! Not where Leucadian breezes sweep

O'er Sappho's memory-haunted billow, But where the glistening night-dews weep

On nameless sorrow's churchyard pillow.

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