The Poetical Works of Robert Montgomery :: :: University of Virginia Library

A vision, by eternity unveil'd,
When midnight in a trance of darkness lay,
My soul beheld. Methought that time and earth
Had vanish'd, while the unforgotten Dead
In glory bright and bodiless appear'd.
How deep their gaze! oh, how divine their smile!
A pensive mildness, an immortal grace
Each Semblance wore; the father had not lost
That light paternal which his living eyes
To greet his children, loved to have express'd;
Still on the mother's placid brow was throned
A tenderness, which triumph'd o'er decay;
And perish'd babes, whose beauty dazzled time,
In the young bloom of resurrection rose
Serenely glad, and innocently-bright.

And thus, by dreams of never-dying soul,
The Dead around us, with a voiceless power
Are present, mentally distinct and known;
As though some chain, whose links are unbeheld,
The living and the dead conjoin'd, that love,
E'en in the grave, no gloomy trance might bear,
But throb immortal in the spirit's core!

Thought flies the banquet, to embrace the tomb:
And, oh! if joy-wing'd hours awhile seduce
A faithful mourner from his fond regret;
If the dull prose of daily life contract
And dry his feelings into worldly dust,
Or selfish duty,—how divinely-pure
The calm of intellectual grief again!
Thus can creative fondness from the world
Of parted spirits, all it loved evoke:
And he whose years are chronicles of wo,
From the strange earth, where few companions dwell,
Can wander where the hopes of youth repose,
And make eternity his mighty home.—