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RAPHAEL.*

I SHALL not soon forget that sight:
The glow of Autumn's westering day,

A hazy warmth, a dreamy light,
On Raphael's picture lay.

It was a simple print I saw,

The fair face of a musing boy;
Yet while I gazed a sense of awe
Seemed blending with my joy.

A simple print: the graceful flow
Of boyhood's soft and wavy hair,
And fresh young lip and cheek, and brow
Unmarked and clear, were there.

Yet through its sweet and calm repose
I saw the inward spirit shine;

It was as if before me rose

The white veil of a shrine.

As if, as Gothland's sage has told,
The hidden life, the man within,
Dissevered from its frame and mould,
By mortal eye were seen.

*Suggested by a portrait of Raphael, at the age of fifteen, in the possession of Thomas Tracy, of Newburyport.

Was it the lifting of that eye,
The waving of that pictured hand?
Loose as a cloud-wreath on the sky,
I saw the walls expand.

The narrow room had vanished,

space

Broad, luminous, remained alone, Through which all hues and shapes of grace And beauty looked or shone.

Around the mighty master came

The marvels which his pencil wrought,
Those miracles of power whose fame
Is wide as human thought.

There drooped thy more than mortal face, Oh Mother, beautiful and mild ! Enfolding in one dear embrace

Thy Saviour and Thy Child!

The rapt brow of the Desert John;
The awful glory of that day,
When all the Father's brightness shone
Through manhood's veil of clay.

And, midst grey prophet forms, and wild
Dark visions of the days of old,
How sweetly woman's beauty smiled
Through locks of brown and gold!

There Fornarina's fair young face
Once more upon her lover shone,
Whose model of an angel's grace
He borrowed from her own.

Slow passed that vision from my view,
But not the lesson which it taught;
The soft, calm shadows which it threw
Still rested on my thought:

The truth, that painter, bard, and sage, Even in Earth's cold and changeful clime, Plant for their deathless heritage

The fruits and flowers of time.

We shape ourselves the joy or fear
Of which the coming life is made,
And fill our Future's atmosphere

With sunshine or with shade.

The tissue of the Life to be

We weave with colors all our own,

And in the field of Destiny

We reap as we have sown.

Still shall the soul around it call

The shadows which it gathered here,

And painted on the eternal wall
The Past shall reappear.

Think ye the notes of holy song
On Milton's tuneful ear have died?
Think ye that Raphael's angel throng
Has vanished from his side?

Oh no! We live our life again :
Or warmly touched or coldly dim
The pictures of the Past remain,—
Man's works shall follow him!

MEMORIALS.

LUCY HOOPER.*

THEY tell me, Lucy, thou art dead

That all of thee we loved and cherished,

Has with thy summer roses perished:

And left, as its young beauty fled,

An ashen memory in its stead

The twilight of a parted day

Whose fading light is cold and vain :
The heart's faint echo of a strain
Of low, sweet music passed away.
That true and loving heart—that gift
Of a mind, earnest, clear, profound,
Bestowing, with a glad unthrift,
Its sunny light on all around,
Affinities which only could

Cleave to the pure, the true, and good;
And sympathies which found no rest,
Save with the loveliest and best.

Of them of thee remains there nought

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But sorrow in the mourner's breast?
A shadow in the land of thought?

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* Died at Brooklyn, L. I., on the 1st of 8th mo., 1841, aged 24 years.

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