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:

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 birthday 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.

BURNS.

TO A ROSE, BROUGHT FROM NEAR ALLOWAY KIRK, IN AYRSHIRE, IN THE AUTUMN OF 1822.

WILD Rose of Alloway! my thanks;

Thou 'mindst me of that autumn noon

When first we met upon "the banks

And braes o' bonny Doon."

Like thine, beneath the thorn-tree's bough,
My sunny hour was glad and brief,
We've crossed the winter sea, and thou
Art withered-flower and leaf.

And will not thy death-doom be mine-
The doom of all things wrought of clay-
And withered my life's leaf like thine,

Wild rose of Alloway?

Not so his memory, for whose sake

My bosom bore thee far and long,

Ilis--who a humbler flower could make
Immortal as his song,

The memory of Burns-a name

That calls, when brimmed her festal cup,

A nation's glory and her shame,

In silent sadness up.

A nation's glory-be the rest

Forgot-she's canonized his mind;

And it is joy to speak the best
We may of human kind.

I've stood beside the cottage bed

Where the Bard-peasant first drew breath;

A straw-thatched roof above his head,
A straw-wrought couch beneath.

And I have stood beside the pile,

His monument-that tells to Heaven

The homage of earth's proudest isle

To that Bard-peasant given!