In sleep, to thee my mind awakes;
Awake, it sleeps to all beside thee.
Who could in absence bear the pain
Of all this fierce and jealous feeling,
But for the hope to meet again,
And see those smiles all sorrow healing?
Then shall we meet, and, heart to heart,
Lament that fate such friends should sever,
And I shall say, "We must not part";
And thou wilt answer, "Never, never!"
FOR A TABLET AT SILBURY HILL.
THIS mound, in some remote and dateless day
Reared o'er a chieftain of the age of hills,
May here detain thee, traveller! from thy road
Not idly lingering. In his narrow house
Some warrior sleeps below, whose gallant deeds
Haply at many a solemn festival
The scald hath sung; but perished is the song
Of praise, as o'er these bleak and barren downs
The wind that passes and is heard no more.
Go, traveller, and remember, when the pomp
Of earthly glory fades, that one good deed,
Unseen, unheard, unnoted by mankind,
Lives in the eternal register of heaven.
A CELEBRATED station and city on the great Roman road from Bath to London; the walls of which, covered with trees, yet remain nearly entire.
HE wild pear whispers and the ivy crawls
Along the circuit of thine ancient walls,
Lone city of the dead! and near this mound
The buried coins of mighty men are found, -
Silent remains of Cæsars and of kings,
Soldiers of whose renown the world yet rings,
In its sad story! These have had their day
Of glory, and have passed like sounds away!
And such their fame! While we the spot behold,
And muse upon the tale that time has told,
We ask where are they?—they whose clarion brayed,
Whose chariot glided, and whose war-horse neighed;
Whose cohorts hastened o'er the echoing way,
Whose eagles glittered to the orient ray!
Ask of this fragment, reared by Roman hands,
That now a lone and broken column stands !
Ask of that road-whose track alone remains
That swept of old o'er mountains, downs, and plains,
And still along the silent champaign leads,
Where are its noise of cars and tramp of steeds?
Ask of the dead, and silence will reply;
Go, seek them in the grave of mortal vanity!
Is this a Roman veteran? Look again,
It is a British soldier, who, in Spain,
At Albuera's glorious fight, has bled;
He, too, has spurred his charger o'er the dead!
Desolate, now, - friendless and desolate, -
Let him the tale of war and home relate.
His wife (and Gainsborough such a form and mien
Would paint, in harmony with such a scene),
With pensive aspect, yet demeanor bland,
A tottering infant guided by her hand,
Spoke of her own green Erin, while her child
Amid the scene of ancient glory smiled,
As spring's first flower smiles from a monument
Of other years, by time and ruin rent!
Lone city of the dead! thy pride is past,
Thy temples sunk, as at the whirlwind's blast!
all silent, where the mingled cries
Of gathered myriads rent the purple skies!
Here where the summer breezes waved the wood
The stern and silent gladiator stood,
And listened to the shouts that hailed his gushing blood.
And on this wooded mount, that oft of yore
Hath echoed to the Lybian lion's roar,
The ear scarce catches, from the shady glen,
The small pipe of the solitary wren.
Y travels' dream and talk for many a year,
At length I view thee, hoary Silchester!
Pilgrim long vowed; now only hither led,
As with new zeal by fervent Mitford fed,
Whose voice of poesy and classic grace
Had breathed a new religion on the place.
'Scaped from the pride, the smoke, the busy hum Of our metropolis, a later Rome,
How sweet to win one calm, uncrowded day,
Where congregated man hath passed away!
For these old city-walls, a half-league round,
Are.but the girdle now of rural ground;
These stones from far-off fields, toil-gathered thence
For man's protection, but a farm's ring-fence;
The fruit of all his planning and his pain
By Nature's certain hand resumed again!
Yet eyes instructed, as along they pass,
May learn from crossing lines of stunted grass,
And stunted wheat-stems, that refuse to grow,
What intersecting causeways sleep below.
And ploughshare, deeplier delving on its path,
Will oft break in on pavement quaint or bath;
Or flax-haired little one, from neighboring cot,
Will hap on rusted coin, she knows not what ;
'Bout which, though grave collectors make great stir,
Some pretty pebble found had more contented her.
From trees that shade thine amphitheatre,
Hoarse caws the rook, and redbreast carols clear;
All silent else! nor human foot nor call
Are heard to-day within its turfy wall;
Gone
many a century since its shouts, its shows;
Here thought may now hold commune with repose.
Yet sheds the sun no other evening glow
Than tinged these walls two thousand years ago;
While leaves, e'en such as then in autumn fell,
Twirling adown with faint decaying smell,
Mix with the pensive thoughts of ruin well.
These walls already reared did Cæsar see?
Rose they, Stonehenge! coevally with thee,
Whose years, in prose untold or Druid-rhyme,
Still baffle thought, the riddle of old Time?
Or was it Rome first fixed to fortify
This pleasant spot? deserted when ? or why?
What name, familiar to historic ear,
Ruled this hill-circled track, Proconsul here;
And master of these fields, though fair they be,
Sighed for his sunny vines beyond the Tyrrhene sea?
Within these bounds when Jove's high altar stood,
Was the oak worshipped in yon sloping wood?
And did each creed, as creeds are wont to do,
The other scorn, and hold itself the true?
Declare, Geologist! what ancient sea
These flinty nodules fashioned, thus to be
Ruin or rock, as each a mystery!
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