Unchanging still from year to year, Thy vernal constellations cheer Perhaps from Nature's earliest May, Have breathed their balmy lives away And oh, till Nature's final doom Yet, lowly cowslip, while in thee From spring to spring behold in me This fading eye and withering mien Then fields and woods I proudly spurned; Till, distanced in Ambition's race, Sick of the world, I turned my face 'Twas spring: my former haunts I found, My favourite flowers adorned the ground, My darling minstrels played; The mountains were with sunset crowned, The valleys dun with shade. With lorn delight the scene I viewed: Looked lovely, through the solitude And still, in Memory's twilight bowers, With mellowing tints, portray The blossoms of life's vernal flowers Till youth's delirious dream is o'er, In age, when error charms no more, THE SWISS COWHERD'S SONG IN A FOREIGN LAND. OH, when shall I visit the land of my birth, Our hamlets, our mountains, With the pride of our mountains, the maid I adore! When shall I return to that lowly retreat, My sister, my brother, And dear Isabella, the joy of them all? Oh, when shall I visit the land of my birth? — 'Tis the loveliest land on the face of the earth. THE OAK. (Imitated from Metastasio.) THE tall oak, towering to the skies, From age to age, in virtue strong, O'erwhelmed at length upon the plain, THE DIAL. THIS shadow on the Dial's face, What is it?-Mortal Man! It is the scythe of Time: It levels all beneath the sky; And still, through each succeeding year, Right onward, with resistless power, Its stroke shall darken every hour, Till Nature's race be run, And Time's last shadow shall eclipse the sun. Not only o'er the Dial's face, This silent phantom, day by day, With slow, unseen, unceasing pace, Steal moments, months, and years away; From hoary rock and aged tree, From proud Palmyra's mouldering walls, From Teneriffe, towering o'er the sea, For still, where'er a shadow sweeps, Like flowerets glittering with the dews of morn, Then Time, the Conqueror, will suspend O'er the wide earth's illumined space, The truest index on its face Points from the churchyard stone. THE ROSES. ADDRESSED TO A FRIEND ON THE BIRTH OF HIS Two Roses, on one slender spray, Together hailed the morning ray, And drank the evening dew; While, sweetly wreathed in mossy green, There sprang a litttle bud between. Through clouds and sunshine, storms and showers, They opened into bloom, Mingling their foliage and their flowers, Their beauty and perfume; While, fostered on its rising stem, The bud became a purple gem. But soon their summer splendour passed, Yet were these Roses to the last The loveliest of their kind, Whose crimson leaves, in falling round, Adorned and sanctified the ground. |