MY OWN FUNERAL FROM DE BÉRANGER THIS morning, as in bed I lay, To ask them what the stir meant; All whose hearts with mine were blended, One drinks my brightest Burgundy, One brings a little rosary, And breathes a blessing o'er me; One finds my pretty chambermaid, And courts her in dumb crambo; Another sees the mutes arrayed With fife by way of flambeau: In your feasting and your fêting, Was ever such a strange array? The mourners all are singing; The pall that clothes my cold remains, Is blazoned o'er with darts and chains, And now they let my coffin fall; And one of them rehearses, For want of holy ritual, My own least holy verses: The sculptor carves a laurel leaf, And silent nature in her grief Just as I am made immortal, Weep for me! they bar the portal. But Isabel, by accident, Was wandering by that minute; She opened that dark monument, And found her slave within it; The clergy said the Mass in vain, The College could not save me; But life, she swears, returned again With the first kiss she gave me: You who deem that life is sorrow, TIME'S SONG O'ER the level plains, where mountains greet me as I go, O'er the desert waste, where fountains at my bidding flow, On the boundless beam by day, on the cloud by night, I am riding hence away: who will chain my flight? War his weary watch was keeping, — I have Grief within her bower was weeping, — I have dried her tear; Pleasure caught a minute's hold, — then I hur ried by, Leaving all her banquet cold, and her goblet dry. Power had won a throne of glory: where is now his fame? Genius said "I live in story:" who hath heard his name? Love beneath a myrtle bough whispered "Why so fast?" And the roses on his brow withered as I past. I have heard the heifer lowing o'er the wild wave's bed; I have seen the billow flowing where the cattle fed; Where began my wanderings? Memory will not say! Where will rest my weary wings? Science turns away! |