University of Virginia Library

A cup of bitter waters has been drained,
And o'er ye, mourners, roll the clouds of woe!
He, the beloved and beautiful, who made
Your mansion, yester noon, the home of joy,
Lies on a dreamless couch.
Poor heart-wrung sire!
And was the task of trial thine to bear
From Allan's fatal stream, that luckless boy
And his drowned play-mate? Aye, that task was thine!
Parental instinct guided thee through gloom
To the drear scene of death; the lost was found,
But oh! in form and lineament how changed!
Locked were his fingers in a rigid clasp;
His eye, late beaming with affection, dim;
His cheek, that felt a mother's morning kiss,
All swollen and discolored—gone its rose;
And the bright locks that she had often smoothed,
Or parted on his brow with gentle hand,
Drenched, soiled and matted by the cruel waves.
It was a time of jubilee, and noise
Of festal cheer was on the breeze of night,
But thou wert conscious of thy loss alone,
And heard it not.
In dull, unmeaning words,
Why tell of the return to home's sad bower,
A cold and lifeless burthen in thine arms,
The mother's shriek while bending o'er her child,
Fraught with a wild, unutterable woe,
Shroud, funeral, darkened bier and swelling mound?
Turn we away from scenes like this, and dwell
On the bright virtues of the early dead,
Who was your pride—the first-born of your house!
The flowers of seven summers had he seen
When the waves wrapped him in their cold embrace;
But during his brief pilgrimage on earth
His tongue was ever musical with truth—
His breast the spotless altar-place of love:
Kind, dutiful, and full of budding thought
That promised fruitage in maturer years,
Tinged by unshadowed wisdom's golden light,
He was the cherished idol of fond hearts,
A star of hope in life's beclouded sky.

I know that ye will miss him morn and eve:
A vacant seat by saddened board and hearth,
His idle implements of boyish sport,
The pictured book on which he loved to gaze,
The rounded hoop that he will roll no more,
And raiment that his beauteous form once graced,
Hanging unused, will often call up tears
From agony's unsounded sunless depths:—
But comfort feel ye, parents, in your grief,
To think that ye have reared a saint for Heaven—
A radiant spirit for that better land,
Where Death, the skeleton, has never breathed
Blight on the passing wind!
A few more years,
Like twilight's flitting hues, will pass away,
And earth's extinguished lamps will fling once more
Around our feet the light of other days—
The precious fragments of the “golden bowl”
Be fashioned into symmetry again—
Ties rudely sundered in this “weary land”
Once more unite, while Sorrow, changed to Joy,
Divests her limbs of sackcloth, and walks forth,
Arrayed in garments brighter than the stars.