The Fall of the Leaf :: :: University of Virginia Library

What mourn'd the poet of the Western Isles?
When blind, and old, and tearful, and forlorn,
He walk'd with heartless men?—That he no more
Could watch thee, rising o'er the distant hill
From opening clouds of mist.—And Milton,—he—
Second to none but Homer,—fall'n on days,
Evil and dark, disgracing and disgraced,
In numbers soft, pathetic, and sublime,
Lamented long, that he alone could see,
With mental organ, Nature's wond'rous works;
And, from the seat of memory alone,
Compare the compass of the infernal shield
To the broad circle of thy spotty globe.
And Haller too,—the frame and mind's physician—
Mourning in exile from his native home:

And he who sung of solitude; —and he,
Who, 'mid the gardens of romantic Sheen,
Would rove, enchanted, while each nightingale
Vied with its rival, which should charm him most.
Thee Klopstock oft, amid his song divine,
Hails with a wild and melancholy grace:
And Dyer, too, who oft, in happier times,
Has charm'd my fancy, and has warm'd my heart;
When 'mid the groves of Grongar I have sat,
Beneath the hawthorn; where, at close of day,
The poet sung old Grongar's matchless shade.

Zimmermann.

Thomson.