POETRY: A METRICAL ESSAY.

25

Which still usurps an unsubstantial | But fruitless flowers, and dark, enven

reign,

With frames too languid for the charms

of sense,

And minds worn down with action too intense;

Tired of a world whose joys they never knew,

Themselves deceived, yet thinking all

untrue;

omed weeds.

But, if so bright the dear illusion

seems,

Thou wouldst be partner of thy poet's dreams,

And hang in rapture on his bloodless charms,

Or die, like Raphael, in his angel arms; and enjoy thy blessed lot, — to

Scarce men without, and less than girls Go, within,

share

--

Sick of their life before its cares be- In Cowper's gloom, or Chatterton's de

And this is Genius! Say, does Whose voice would greet me with a

Heaven degrade

sweeter tone,

The manly frame, for health, for action Whose living hand more kindly press made?

my own,

Break down the sinews, rack the brow Than theirs, could Memory, as her silent tread

with pains,

Blanch the bright cheek, and drain the Prints the pale flowers that blossom o'er

purple veins,

the dead,

To clothe the mind with more extended Those breathless lips, now closed in

sway,

peace, restore,

Thus faintly struggling in degenerate Or wake those pulses hushed to beat no clay?

more?

No! gentle maid, too ready to admire,

Thou calm, chaste scholar! I can see thee now,

Though false its notes, the pale enthusi- The first young laurels on thy pallid

brow,

ast's lyre; If this be genius, though its bitter springs O'er thy slight figure floating lightly Glowed like the morn beneath Aurora's

wings,

down

In graceful folds the academic gown,

Seek not the source whose sullen bosom On thy curled lip the classic lines, that

How nice the mind that sculptured | Have such e'er been? Remember Can

them with thought,

ning's name!

And triumph glistening in the clear Do such still live? Let "Alaric's Dirge"

with snow,

proclaim!

Immortal Art! where'er the rounded sky

Bends o'er the cradle where thy children

lie,

Their home is earth, their herald every tongue

Whose accents echo to the voice that

sung.

Since thou wast laid its budding leaves One leap of Ocean scatters on the sand The quarried bulwarks of the loosening land;

below,

Thine image mingles with my closing

fell,And I was spared to breathe this last farewell!

One thrill of earth dissolves a century's toil

Strewed like the leaves that vanish in the soil;

One hill o'erflows, and cities sink below, Their marbles splintering in the lava's glow;

But one sweet tone, scarce whispered to

the air,

From shore to shore the blasts of ages bear;

But lived there one in unremembered One humble name, which oft, perchance,

has borne

days, Or lives there still, who spurns the poet's The tyrant's mockery and the courtier's bays, Whose fingers, dewy from Castalia's Towers o'er the dust of earth's forgotten

springs,

scorn,

graves,

Rest on the lyre, yet scorn to touch the As once, emerging through the waste of

Who shakes the senate with the silver The rocky Titan, round whose shattered

The groves of Pindus might have sighed Coiled the last whirlpool of the drowning sphere !

to own?