University of Virginia Library

Who has not known in being's lonely hour
An aching void of pleasure and of soul?
When friendship, love, and beauty lose their charms,
And dark creation's scanned with baleful eye;
When joy, or grief, or love, or hate, is lost
In the mind's starless desolation; when
Edens odoriferous shed unprized perfume,
And all the beauty-crowned habitants seem
Ruin's pestiferous harpies; when clouds
Of blackness shroud the empyreal throne
Enamelled but with scathing fires of wrath.

Balm is shed on adamant, for the soul
Shrinks from perception—unallured, unwrought
By all that's lovely, to unveil the gloom
Of its mis'ry terrible—dark, dormant,
Desolate, as slumbering chaos, ere
Creation's choral hymn, when raven time
Spread his fleet pinions to the pauseless blast,
Awoke the emulgent empyreuma,
And, with ethereal worth, and symmetry,
Buried volcanic fires, whose quenchless flames
Pour hottest lava o'er the hopeless breast.

Can ought, decked in the world's habiliments,
Awake, and renovate, or bright beams shed
Through the drear palace of the sunless soul?
Pleasure! assay thy vaunted magic powers,
Proclaim thine orgies bacchanal, and wear
The veilless robes of mirth; no chalice,
Brimming with luxurious bane, forbear;
Hold grasping dalliance with each wanton form
That flits across thy path, and oh! invoke
The sable shield of hell to consecrate
Thy hall, and hang a dreadless battlement
Around thee! The heart is lone, sick, and sad,
Amid the full hilarity of mirth;
The flushed cheek, and red eyeball's glare, unlike
The rosy-winged morn, are but the fires
That canopy the thunderbolt—portend
The death-encircled tornado, and shroud
The daring, and heroic wanderer.

Descend, Nemesis, blighted honour shield,
Avenge thy votary, and in crimson gore
Unstain polluted dignity; sabres
Flash in battle's glory, and gild the shrine
Of a proud nation's grandeur; and the din
Of havoc is unheeded, when the world
Derives her freedom from ensanguined fields;
But, when the hands, that fondly clasped in youth,
Wield demons' falchions; when the bosoms,
That throbbed with fondest love, are bared to dye
The gory shaft; when the once mingling breath
Of friendship taints the impassioned fury.
Of unhallowed wrath; indignation walks
The welkin, deep and endless shame attends
The bloodhound—heaven and earth's anathema.

O sapient reason! from thy earth-girt throne
Wield the imperious sceptre of dominion,
And recall the golden visions of the pride,
And dignity of man, that scorns to crouch,
And stoop to morbid mental gloom: paint scenes
That stretch beyond the future's sable veil
With glowing fancy's crayon, and awake
The soul unconscious of primeval worth,
Can fitful rays through the deep dungeon's grate
Illume the darkness of the felon's cell?
Or will it rather point the straining eye
To solitude forlorn, and visible?

Rise, O fancy! wave thine airy pinions!
Enamoured graces float along thy track;
Love sheds emollient powers, and o'er the mind
Holds sway unrivalled; lo! the heart dilates,
The soul, enchanted, lights the lowering gloom,
And lucid splendour glows upon the mien.
Alas! the evanescent, and ephem'ral glare
Was but the flash, that lit the dun, dark night,
Which lowers the deeper for the gilded guile.
Strike, O Music, heaven-descended maid!
The thrilling wires of the symphonious lyre,
Wake the soul's celestial harmonies, and thrill
Each trembling fibre, and responsive nerve,
Till pealing anthems vaulted roofs rebound,
And e'en the walls seem bending o'er to hear.
Like fabled ethnic libertines, who stand
Immerged in floods, that lave the sacred shore,
And view the embowering groves, and hear the choir
Angelic tune their golden lyres, and raise
Their heavenly notes till the empyrean rings
With melody ethereal, and pæans grand,
But ne'er can mingle with the votive throng;
So sinks the heart, whose youthful accents breathed
Philanthropy and sweet adoration
Unmingled with a thought unholy, or
Unheeding, to the Sovereign of all worlds;
But mangled by the wretch, whose impious name
Shall live in infamy, or forgotten sink
To its own native nothingness, each core
Is petrified, and made the dread abode
Of dissocial, hopeless, rayless misery.
The beauty tunes her harp, the bard his lyre
Of pleasure, and the hero winds the trump
Of glory—not for him, if pleased in life,
Most happy with the muse of his sad strains,
With misery fraught, and not misanthropy.
Nor wealth, nor pomp, nor power, a moment gild
Of life's delirious turmoil; mind toils,
Hearts freeze, hands grasp, love flies, and worth expires;
Still the insatiate thirst's unslaked for gold.
Some human souls are an odious compound
Of clay and foul corruption; and the flame
Of holiness lives and burns like the torch
In hydrogen; the heartless recusant,
Who knows no God but self, no charm but earth,
No breeze propitious, but whose pinions waft
The treasures of a world to him, enjoys
His little day—and dies—and leaves a gilded curse
Behind him. Then be his pathway mine,
When the soul divests itself of being,
And clay reigns empress over kindred worms.

Come philosophic wisdom, then, unfurl
Thy sable vestments, and unroll thy lore,
And loose thy learned stole, and soothe the wretch,
Whose joys are blasted by a graceless world—
“Stem mountain billows when the lurid sky
And quaking earth are blending—steer thy bark
In the rude tempest's wake, and hope for peace,”
Is all the solace Pallas yields to man.

But lo! on Zion-hill a banner waves,
And radiant glories beam, and bliss-crowned choir
Invoke the effulgent Deity, and wear
The jewelled diadems of paradise,
And wave the embossed censer of perfume,
And tune the hallowed cymbal to his praise.
And there the pilgrims of earth's troublous way
Shout their triumphal hymn—the anthem high
Of pure, unsullied, grand, unbondaged state.
Faith's halcyon and undazzled mien shall glow
In full fruition—Hope, on golden wings,
Shall mingle with the lauding hosts around
Jehovah's veilless throne, where Messiah
With mien extatic and benign, shall reign
In majesty and love, through boundless space.
For earth religion has descended, crowned
With the unseen glory of the Being
Whose dazzling mien was veiled in darkness erst
On high; she is our guardian angel
O'er this vast, trackless, desart of despair;
She heals the wound, where rankle sorrow's shafts,
And o'er the heart pours Gilead's sacred balm.