University of Virginia Library

STANZAS On the Death of His Most Gracious Majesty KING GEORGE THE THIRD.

Sacred the grief that balms the death of Kings,
And shrines their memory in the heart's true blood:
With such the rising Muse her tribute brings,
To mourn the nobly great, the greatly good.

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The rising Muse, who ever wreathes her harp
With the dark cypress and the sprig of yew,
Whose soul is sadness, fortune ne'er may warp,
The mood of mind to melancholy true.

The passing-bell
Hath tolled its knell
For a Star of Brunswick set!
But few hours gone
O'er the Royal Son
Was the eye of Sorrow wet!
The tear was not dried,
When, pealing wide,
Came the omen again on the gale —
Whose tale doth it tell,
That pausing knell?
For the Monarch of England wail!
The King of the fair and the free —
The Lord of the bright and the brave —
And such shall dew the cheek for thee,
And worship at glory's grave!
But didst thou in glory set?

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Alas! for thee — thou wert shrouded in gloom,
And gone from the eye, ere thy hour were come,
To sink on the Western hill's bright coronet,
In the hues of the heavens — that beautiful pyre,
Whereon, like the phœnix, the sun dies in fire!
Thy day was a summer one,
Lasting and bright,
But its setting no splendour won
From its length or its light —
The cloud and the blast
Came sudden and darkling,—
Through the shadow they cast
Not a gleam was there sparkling —
But the eve of the summer was wintry and wild,
And the land was a desert where Hope never smiled—
Thou wert shorn of the rays they may envy who can,
But, bereft of the Monarch, we felt for the Man!

Weep not, for he was tearless in his woe,
And life was lost in him who bore it so,
Unconscious of its being or its blindness —
The scions of his house were rent away,
And that he felt not, oh! 'twas Heaven's kindness —
Else had his spirit been subdued to clay,

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— For they were portions of it, and his heart, —
And maddened with the fierce sense of the anguish
That of his phrenzy even had been part —
And he again had seen them fade and languish,
And from the tomb raved for them, till they came —
Then he had blessed them — and all hope and fear
Felt, e'en as he before had felt the same,
Watched by the bed of death, and again maddened there!
Weep not — From Nature's night that he is free;
Free from the fetters of the soul diseased,
The mind, the image of the Deity,
From its long heavy slumber well released —
Great and most glorious in the land of light, —
The land of spirits — throned among the kings,
Whose virtues, equal to their task of might,
Were only equalled by their sufferings!

February 1, 1820.