Page images
PDF
EPUB

I will not own a brighter eye

Than mine has caught your truant sigh,—
I will not own a fairer brow

Than mine has made you captive now.

I deem my eye is still as bright
As when it fixed your charmed sight;
I deem my brow is still as fair

As when you gazed and worshipped there.

But well I know that they have been
Once, twice, or thrice already seen,-
I know the charm of change too well
Not to bow down and own the spell.

Love's vows are writ upon the wave,
And are unto themselves a grave.
They call Love ever young; but he
Is as old age in memory.

Farewell then, sometime love of mine,
Yet claim I gratitude of thine ;
Surely that love is something worth
Whose death is laughing as its birth.

L. E. L.

MAN'S LOVE.

BY THE AUTHOR OF "SOLITARY HOURS."

To worship for a season,
To flatter, feign, pursue;
To love with little reason,-
To leave as blindly too :

Or, having won and worn,
To fling the rose away,—
Or, having crushed, to scorn
Its
premature decay:

To stab with sharp unkindness,
With cold neglect to kill;
To' abuse with selfish blindness
The love no wrongs can chill:

To fly the hour of danger,

The bed where sickness lies,
And leave, perhaps, a stranger
To close the dying eyes:

And, ere her last cold pillow

The green grass waves above,
To cast away the willow,

And choose another love :

Thus—thus—'tis thus men love!

BALLACHULISH.

SWEET paradise beneath the mountains rude,
That centinel Glen-Coe's terrific vale,

Smile ever thus in peace and solitude;
Smooth be thy lake, and gentle be thy gale!
Methinks good angels are abroad, and sing
At morn or noon, at eve or moonlight pale,
High hallelujahs to the Omnific King,
Who bade thee in thine awful beauty show
What primal Eden was, ere yet the sting
Of sin and death had marred the bliss below.
O, were the season ripe to quit the roar
Of life, and all its turbulence of woe,

Here would I wait my voyage to that shore

Where sorrow, pain, and guilt, shall be no more.

THE STORM.

BY N. T. CARRINGTON.

THE evening winds shrieked wildly;—the dark cloud
Rested upon the horizon's verge, and grew
Mightier and mightier, flinging its black arch
Around the troubled offing, till it grasped

Within its terrible embrace the all

That eye could see of ocean.

Then arose,

Forth from the infinite of waters, sounds

Confused-appalling;-from the dread lee-shore
There came a heavier swell, a lengthened roar,
Each moment deeper, rolling on the ear

With most portentous voice. Rock howled to rock,
Headland to headland, as the Atlantic flung
Its billows shoreward, and the feathery foam
Of twice ten thousand broken surges sailed
High o'er the dim-seen land. The startled gull,
With scream prophetic, sought his savage cliff,
And even the bird that loves to sail between
The ridges of the sea, with hurried wing
Flew from the blast's fierce onset.

One-far off

One hapless ship was seen upon the deep,
Breasting the western waters. Nothing lived
Around her-all was desert,-for the storms
Had made old Ocean's realm a solitude,

And there she sat,

Where man might fear to roam.
A lonely thing amid the gathering strife,
With pinions folded, not for rest, prepared
To struggle with the tempest.

And it came

As night abruptly closed ;-nor moon nor star
Guided her course; but darkness, deep as that
Which reigned o'er the primeval chaos, wrapt
That fated bark, save when the lightning hissed
Along the bursting billow. Ocean howled
To the high thunder, and the thunder spoke
To the rebellious ocean with a voice

So terrible, that all the rush and roar
Of waves were but as the meek voice of rills
To that deep, everlasting peal which comes
From thee, Niagara, wild flinging o'er
Thy steep the rivers of a world! Anon

The lightnings glared more fiercely, burning round
The glowing offing with unwonted stay,
As if they lingered o'er the black abyss,

And raised its veil of horror but to show

Its wild and tortured face. And then the winds

[merged small][ocr errors]
« PreviousContinue »