Metrical essays :: :: University of Virginia Library

“When we reflect how soon the season of life is over; and that no one hour of the past can ever contribute a single moment to the future: when we behold the young and the beautiful withering in their prime, or feel ourselves the last survivor of many friends, after having seen the best of their wishes vanish in disappointment, and the last of their hopes melt into nothing, what awful views of nature and of life are presented to the imagination!” P. Bucke.

I

I stood in a romantic pass,
Near which swept many streams;
The ancient mountains pale and far
Lay like a land of dreams.

II

The sunlight bathed the gorgeous sky,
The sunlight wreathed the plain;
Golden the summer grass appeared,
Golden the tranquil main.

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III

The trees sprang up like hope to heaven.
The flowers grew close like love;
Nothing but beauty was seen below,
Nothing but glory above.

IV

Rose near a stately edifice,
Marble its colonnades;
Fountains, and rarest statuary,
Gleam'd 'tween the trees' green shades.

V

Like soft and silvery clouds of morn,
A lake shone quietly;
The white swan plumed her graceful wings,
The red deer darted by.

VI

It seemed a shrine for happiness,
A spot insphered in bliss;
For surely nought of care might taint
A home so bright as this!

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VII

Alas for life—alas for love—
Who breathes, that hath not been
By sorrow pressed? in fairest buds
Some blight is ever seen!

VIII

Came on mine ear those weary sounds
Afflicted bosoms give!
The tones which tell Hope's chord is lost,
As few may breathe—and live!

IX

She who such sorrows uttered
Had direst cause for tears;
Widowed and childless and alone,
Stricken with grief and years.

X

The lady of those halls she was,
Of that most rich domain.
Gave these no joy? her head was bowed—
Her tears fell thick like rain!

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XI

And melancholy 'twas to see
The land such glory wear;
It seem'd as all the earth knew bliss
Save her—save only her!

XII

Days fled—when up that lonely pass
A funeral train twined slow;
Dark waved the death plumes on the air,
With a heaviness like woe.

XIII

And Time hath done his work of ill
On statues, fount, and hall;
Ruined and lone, they, year by year,
Fragment by fragment fall!

XIV

Such are the treacherous joys of life,
The hopes we make our own.
Beams there an eye that hath not wept
Lives one grief has not known?