As thro' the garden's desert paths I rove, What fond illusions swarm in every grove! How oft, when purple evening tinged the west, We watched the emmet to her grainy nest; Welcomed the wild-bee home on weary wing, Laden with sweets, the choicest of the spring! How oft inscribed, with Friendship's votive rhyme, The bark now silvered by the touch of Time; Soared in the swing, half pleased and half afraid, Thro' sister elms that waved their summer-shade;

Or strewed with crumbs yon root-inwoven seat,
To lure the redbreast from his lone retreat!

Childhood's loved group revisits every scene;
The tangled wood-walk, and the tufted green!
Indulgent MEMORY wakes, and lo, they live!
Clothed with far softer hues than Light can give.
Thou first, best friend that Heaven assigns below,
To sooth and sweeten all the cares we know;
Whose glad suggestions still each vain alarm,
When nature fades, and life forgets to charm;
Thee would the Muse invoke!-to thee belong
The sage's precept, and the poet's song.
What softened views thy magic glass reveals,

When o'er the landscape Time's meek twilight steals!
As when in ocean sinks the orb of day,
Long on the wave reflected lustres play;
Thy tempered gleams of happiness resigned
Glance on the darkened mirror of the mind.

The School's lone porch, with reverend mosses grey,
Just tells the pensive pilgrim where it lay.
Mute is the bell that rung at peep of dawn,
Quickening my truant-feet across the lawn:
Unheard the shout that rent the noontide air,
When the slow dial gave a pause to care.
Up springs, at every step, to claim a tear,
Some little friendship formed and cherished here;
And not the lightest leaf, but trembling teems
With golden visions, and romantic dreams!

Down by yon hazel copse, at evening, blazed The Gipsy's fagot-there we stood and gazed; Gazed on her sun-burnt face with silent awe, Her tattered mantle, and her hood of straw; Her moving lips, her caldron brimming o'er; The drowsy brood that on her back she bore, Imps, in the barn with mousing owlet bred, From rifled roost at nightly revel fed;