FITZ-GREENE HALLECK.

MARCO BOZZARIS.

At midnight, in his guarded tent,

The Turk was dreaming of the hour
When Greece, her knee in suppliance bent,

Should tremble at his power:
In dreams, through camp and court he bore
The trophies of a conqueror;

In dreams his song of triumph heard ;
Then wore his monarch's signet-ring;
Then pressed that monarch's throne, a king;
As wild his thoughts, and gay of wing,

As Eden's garden-bird.

At midnight, in the forest-shades,

Bozzaris ranged his Suliote band
True as the steel of their tried blades,

Heroes in heart and hand.
There had the Persian's thousands stood;
There had the glad earth drunk their blood,

On old Platæa's day –
And now there breathed that haunted air,
The sons of sires who conquered there,
With arm to strike, and soul to dare,
As quick, as far as they.

An hour passed on - the Turk awoke

That bright dream was his last;
He woke to hear his sentries shriek -

“ To arms! they come! the Greek! the Greek!" He woke ——to die midst flame, and smoke, And shout, and groan, and sabre-stroke,

And death-shots falling thick and fast
As lightnings from the mountain-cloud;
And heard, with voice as trumpet-loud,

Bozzaris cheer his band :
“ Strike-till the last armed foe expires;
Strike--for your altars, and your fires;
Strike-for the green graves

of
your

sires God, and your native land !"

They fought like brave men - long, and well;

They piled that ground with Moslem slain;
They conquered - but Bozzaris fell,

Bleeding at every vein.
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
Calmly, as to a night's repose,

Like flowers at set of sun.

Come to the bridal chamber, Death!

Come to the mother's, when she feels For the first time, her first-born's breath

Come when the blessed seals That close the pestilence are broke, And crowded cities wail its stroke

Come in consumption's ghastly form,
The earthquake-shock, the ocean-storm-
Come when the heart beats high and warm,

With banquet-song, and dance, and wine
And thou art terrible - the tear,
The groan, the knell, the pall, the bier,
And all we know, or dream, or fear

Of agony, are thine.

But to the hero, when his sword

Has won the battle for the free,
Thy voice sounds like a prophet's word ;
And in its hollow tones, are heard

The thanks of millions yet to be.
Come when his task of fame is wrought --
Come with her laurel-leaf, blood-bought-

Come in her crowning hour -- and then
Thy sunken eye's unearthly light
To him is welcome as the sight

Of sky and stars to prisoned men:
Thy grasp is welcome as the hand
Of brother in a foreign land;
Thy summons, welcome as the cry
That told the Indian isles were nigh

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.

1

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 birth-day bells :
Of thee her babes' 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.

N. P. WILLIS.

SPRING.

The Spring is here, the delicate-footed May,

With its slight fingers full of leaves and flowers, And with it comes a thirst to be away,

Wasting in wood-paths its voluptuous hours A feeling that is like a sense of wings, Restless to soar above these perishing things.

We pass out from the city's feverish hum,

To find refreshment in the silent woods; And Nature, that is beautiful and dumb,

Like a cool sleep upon the pulses broods : Yet even there a restless thought will steal, To teach the indolent heart it still must feel.

Strange, that the audible stillness of the noon,

The waters tripping with their silver feet, The turning to the light of leaves in June,

And the light whisper as their edges meet : Strange, that they fill not, with their tranquil tone, The spirit, walking in their midst alone.

There's no contentment in a world like this,

Save in forgetting the immortal dream; We inay

not gaze upon the stars of bliss, That through the cloud-rifts radiantly stream ; Bird-like, the prisoned soul will lift its eye, And pine till it is hooded from the sky.