 | The poems, sacred, passionate, and humorous, of Nathaniel Parker Willis |  |
189
WAKING-DREAM IN SICKNESS.
(YALE COLLEGE, 1827.)
The night creeps wearily. I lit my lampTo hide the brightness of that morning star
That mocks me with a sleeplessness like mine—
Coldly and glitteringly apart and lone!
How unlike life it is—this sickness-waking!
Conscious of life's enfeebled link no more
The soul feels death-released; and, as the star
Wakes not the colors of earth's slumbering flowers,
Nor warms the darkness of the mountain brow
From which so pathlessly it soars away,
So, with strange lift, unnaturally bright,
The sick man's thought soars tracklessly and far:
The pale cheek on the pillow, and the pulse
Of the sad silent heart, made deathlier only
By thought in which their faintness has no share!
| The poems, sacred, passionate, and humorous, of Nathaniel Parker Willis | |