If thus to be its sole employ Can give thee one faint gleam of joy, A tongue that never can deceive, And though that heart be dead to mine, Of something I should long to warm, I'll take it, wheresoeer I stray, The bright, cold burthen of my way! SONG. TAKE back the sigh, thy lips of art Take back the kiss, that faithless sigh With all the warmth of truth imprest; Yet, no-the fatal kiss may lie, Upon thy lip its sweets would die, Or bloom to make a rival blest! Take back the vows that, night and day, As sweetly as they've ruin'd mine! A BALLAD. THE LAKE OF THE DISMAL SWAMP. WRITTEN AT NORFOLK IN VIRGINIA. They tell of a young man who lost his mind upon the death of a girl he loved, and who, suddenly disappearing from his friends, was never afterwards heard of. As he had frequently said, in his ravings, that the girl was not dead, but gone to the Dismal Swamp, it is supposed he had wandered into that dreary wilderness, and had died of hunger, or been lost in some of its dreadful morasses.-Anon. La Poésie a ses monstres comme la Nature.-D'ALEMBERT. "THEY made her a grave, too cold and damp "For a soul so warm and true; "And she's gone to the Lake of the Dismal Swamp,* 66 Where, all night long, by a fire-fly lamp, "She paddles her white canoe. “And her fire-fly lamp I soon shall see, "When the footstep of Death is near !" * The Great Dismal Swamp is ten or twelve miles distant from Norfolk, and the Lake in the middle of it (about seven miles long) is called Drummond's Pond. Away to the Dismal Swamp he speeds- Through tangled juniper, beds of reeds, Through many a fen, where the serpent feeds, And man never trod before! And when on the earth he sunk to sleep, He lay where the deadly vine doth weep And near him the she-wolf stirr'd the brake, And the copper-snake breathed in his ear, Till he starting cried, from his dream awake, "Oh! when shall I see the dusky Lake, "And the white canoe of my dear?" He saw the Lake, and a meteor bright "Welcome," he said, "my dear-one's light!" And the dim shore echoed, for many a night, The name of the death-cold maid! Till he hollow'd a boat of the birchen bark, Which carried him off from shore ; Far he follow'd the meteor spark, The wind was high and the clouds were dark, And the boat return'd no more. But oft, from the Indian hunter's camp, Are seen, at the hour of midnight damp, |