I WALK among thy orange-groves, Hyeres,
And feel, the native of a northern clime,—
The softness of thy breezes, at a time
When all elsewhere the garb of Winter wears.
To shield thee from the blast, behind thee rears
A hill that would fatigue the strongest limb;
To mount it, though with horse's aid I climb,
Is difficult; the shrewd and biting airs *,
Which blow upon its dark and pine-clad breast,
Instruct me in the worth of one true friend,
On whose fond, faithful bosom we may rest
Safe from the storm,-as birds within their nest,
Sheltered by one warm wing;-thus seems to bend
This hill above the sick and the distrest.
* "The air bites shrewdly."
ON THE FUNERAL OF AN ENGLISH GENTLEMAN
AT HYERES 18.
Ir is, I own, a melancholy thought
In foreign climes to sicken and to die-
Our mouldering bones in a strange soil to lie
Unwept, unhonoured. ******, such thy lot,
Whom the fond hope of health had hither brought
To fade away before a mother's eye.
Yet thy firm faith of Immortality
Absorbed all lower sympathies. The spot,
Wherein thy earthly part hath rest, is one
Of beauty and of touching solitude.
Mid vine-clad hills a valley green and lone
Scarce hears nor heeds the tempests as they brood,
But, peaceful as the olive trees around,
Awaits the last Trump's solitary sound.
THIS Gorge I gaze on is an Alpine scene.
Above my head rise lofty rocks and steep,
Whose dark and ragged sides by straggling sheep
And mountain goats are cropped. The road between
Creeps like a dusky serpent. Nothing green,
Or grass, or leafy tree, disturbs the deep
And silent solitude, and deathlike sleep,
That reign among these mountains. There hath been, Time out of mind, upon yon rugged hill,
A vomiting volcano. Many years
Hath slept within earth's bosom its fierce fire;
But there are relics of its former ire:
Yon mass of rock a deep dark stain yet wears,
And black stones form the bed of this dull rill.
UNHAPPY men! their miserable doom
Plunges them, hopeless, in the lowest deep
Of vice, wherein they wallow till the sleep
Of death upon their weary eyes shall come.
The curtain drops before them. In the tomb
They cannot
pray for mercy, cannot weep
Their sins. Their souls will God for ever keep
In penal darkness, nor permit the gloom,
The moral degradation of their state,
Their mental blindness, ever to be broken, when
The light of heaven on their souls may shine?
And shall they grope in the Tartarean den
Of vice to endless ages, that their fate
May warn blest spirits of the wrath divine?
THE AMPHITHEATRE AT NISMES.
THE spirits of the mighty dead are here;
I see them flitting through the dim arcades,
Like fairies revelling in the moonlight glades,
That now in light, and now in shade appear.
I wander in this Amphitheatre,
As Dante roamed amid the dreary shades
Of the dark regions of the dead. Who treads
Spots to the mind of man for ever dear,
Sacred to fame and immortality,
Must feel his littleness, and shrink beneath
The shadows of old Time,-while Memory
Renews her youth, inhales a Roman's breath,
And feels, while she defies the force of death,
That she and great men's names can never die.
|