Oh! silent spirit of the place,
If, lingering with the ruined year,
Thy hoary form and awful face
I yet might watch and worship here !
mine ear,
Thy storm were music to
Thy wildest walk a shelter given
Sublimer thoughts on earth to find,
And share, with no unhallowed mind,
The majesty of heaven.
What though the bosom friends of Fate,
Prosperity's unweaned brood,
Thy consolations cannot rate,
O self-dependent solitude!
Yet with a spirit unsubdued,
Though darkened by the clouds of Care,
To worship thy congenial gloom,
A pilgrim to the Prophet's tomb
The Friendless shall repair.
On him the world hath never smiled
.Or looked but with accusing eye;-
All-silent goddess of the wild,
To thee that misanthrope shall fly!
I hear his deep soliloquy,
I mark his proud but ravaged form,
As stern he wraps his mantle round,
And bids, on winter's bleakest ground,
Defiance to the storm.
Peace to his banished heart, at last,
In thy dominions shall descend,
And, strong as beechwood in the blast,
His spirit shall refuse to bend ;
Enduring life without a friend,
The world and falsehood left behind,
Thy votary shall bear elate,
(Triumphant o'er opposing Fate,)
His dark inspired mind.
But dost thou, Folly, mock the Muse
A wanderer's mountain walk to sing,
Who shuns a warring world, nor wooes
The vulture cover of its wing?
Then fly, thou cowering, shivering thing,
Back to the fostering world beguiled,
To waste in self-consuming strife
The loveless brotherhood of life,
Away, thou lover of the race
That hither chased yon weeping deer!
If Nature's all majestic face
More pitiless than man's appear;
Or if the wild winds seem more drear
Than man's cold charities below,
Behold around his peopled plains,
Where'er the social savage reigns,
Exuberance of woe!
His art and honours wouldst thou seek
Embossed on grandeur's giant walls?
Or hear his moral thunders speak
Where senates light their airy halls,
Where man his brother man enthralls;
Or sends his whirlwind warrants forth
To rouse the slumbering fiends of war,
To dye the blood-warm waves afar,
And desolate the earth?
From clime to clime pursue the scene,
And mark in all thy spacious way,
Where'er the tyrant man has been,
There Peace, the cherub, cannot stay;
In wilds and woodlands far away
She builds her solitary bower,
Where only anchorites have trod,
Or friendless men, to worship God,
Have wandered for an hour.
In such a far forsaken vale,
And such, sweet Eldurn vale, is thine,Afflicted nature shall inhale
Heaven-borrowed thoughts and joys divine; No longer wish, no more repine
For man's neglect or woman's scorn ;
Then wed thee to an exile's lot,
For if the world hath loved thee not,
Its absence may be borne.
CAN restlessness reach the cold sepulchred head?-
Ay, the quick have their sleep-walkers, so have the dead.
There are brains, though they moulder, that dream in the tomb,
And that maddening forehear the last trumpet of doom,
Till their corses start sheeted to revel on earth,
Making horror more deep by the semblance of mirth :
By the glare of new-lighted volcanoes they dance,
Or at mid-sea appal the chilled mariner's glance.
Such, I wot, was the band of cadaverous smile
Seen ploughing the night-surge of Heligo's isle.
The foam of the Baltic had sparkled like fire,
And the red moon looked down with an aspect of ire;
But her beams on a sudden grew sick-like and grey,
And the mews that had slept clanged and shrieked far away-
And the buoys and the beacons extinguished their light,
As the boat of the stony-eyed dead came in sight,
High bounding from billow to billow; each form
Had its shroud like a plaid flying loose to the storm;
With an oar in each pulseless and icy-cold hand,
Fast they ploughed, by the lee-shore of Heligoland,
Such breakers as boat of the living ne'er crossed;
Now surf-sunk for minutes again they uptossed,
And with livid lips shouted reply o'er the flood
To the challenging watchman that curdled his blood-
'We are dead-we are bound from our graves in the west,
First to Hecla, and then to- -'Unmeet was the rest
For man's ear. The old abbey bell thundered its clang,
And their eyes gleamed with phosphorous light as it rang:
Ere they vanished, they stopped, and gazed silently grim,
Till the eye could define them, garb, feature and limb.
Now who were those roamers?—of gallows or wheel
Bore they marks, or the mangling anatomist's steel?
No, by magistrates' chains 'mid their grave-clothes you saw,
They were felons too proud to have perished by law;
But a ribbon that hung where a rope should have been,
'Twas the badge of their faction, its hue was not green,
Showed them men who had trampled and tortured and driven
To rebellion the fairest Isle breathed on by Heaven,-
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