AN EPITAPH

ON A ROBIN-REDBREAST.*

TREAD lightly here, for here, 'tis said,
When piping winds are hushed around,
A small note wakes from underground,
Where now his tiny bones are laid.
No more in lone and leafless groves,
With ruffled wing and faded breast,
His friendless, homeless spirit roves;

-Gone to the world where birds are blest!
Where never cat glides o'er the green,
Or school-boy's giant form is seen;
But Love, and Joy, and smiling Spring
Inspire their little souls to sing!

Inscribed on an urn in the flower-garden at Hafod.

P

AN ITALIAN SONG.

DEAR is my little native vale,

The ring-dove builds and murmurs there;

Close by my cot she tells her tale

To every passing villager.

The squirrel leaps from tree to tree,

And shells his nuts at liberty.

In orange-groves and myrtle-bowers,

That breathe a gale of fragrance round, I charm the fairy-footed hours

With my

loved lute's romantic sound;

Or crowns of living laurel weave,
For those that win the race at eve.

The shepherd's horn at break of day,
The ballet danced in twilight glade,
The canzonet and roundelay

Sung in the silent green-wood shade;
These simple joys, that never fail,

Shall bind me to my native vale.

TO THE BUTTERFLY.

CHILD of the sun! pursue thy rapturous flight, Mingling with her thou lov'st in fields of light; And, where the flowers of Paradise unfold, Quaff fragrant nectar from their cups of gold. There shall thy wings, rich as an evening-sky, Expand and shut with silent ecstasy!

-Yet wert thou once a worm, a thing that crept On the bare earth, then wrought a tomb and slept. And such is man; soon from his cell of clay

To burst a seraph in the blaze of day!

WRITTEN IN

THE HIGHLANDS OF SCOTLAND,

SEPTEMBER 2, 1812.

BLUE was the loch, the clouds were gone, Ben-Lomond in his glory shone,

When, Luss, I left thee; when the breeze Bore me from thy silver sands,

Thy kirk-yard wall among the trees,

Where, grey with age, the dial stands;

That dial so well-known to me!

-Tho' many a shadow it had shed,
Beloved Sister, since with thee

The legend on the stone was read.

The fairy-isles fled far away;
That with its woods and uplands green,
Where shepherd-huts are dimly seen,
And songs are heard at close of day;
That too, the deer's wild covert, fled,

And that, the asylum of the dead:
While, as the boat went merrily,

Much of ROB Roy the boat-man told;