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ON PARTING.

J.

THE kiss, dear maid! thy lip has left,
Shall never part from mine,
Till happier hours restore the gift
Untainted back to thine,

Thy parting glance, which fondly beams,

An equal love may see:

The tear that from thine eyelid streams Can weep no change in me.

3,

I ask no pledge to make me blest
In gazing when alone;

Nor one memorial for a breast,

Whose thoughts are all thine own,

4.

Nor need I write-to tell the tale
My pen were doubly weak:
Oh! what can idle words avail,
Unless the heart could speak?

5.

By day or night, in weal or woe,
That heart, no longer free,

Must bear the love it cannot show,
And silent ache for thee.

FROM THE TURKISH.

I.

THE chain I gave was fair to view,
The lute I added sweet in sound,
The heart that offered both was true,
And ill deserved the fate it found.

2.

These gifts were charmed by secret spell
Thy truth in absence to divine;
And they have done their duty well,
Alas! they could not teach thee thine.

3.

That chain was firm in every link,
But not to bear a stranger's touch;
That lute was sweet-till thou could'st think
In other hands its notes were such.

4.

Let him, who from thy neck unbound
The chain which shivered in his grasp,

Who saw that lute refuse to sound,
Restring the chords, renew the clasp.

5.

When thou wert changed, they altered too; The chain is broke, the music mute :

'Tis past to them and thee adieu--

False heart, frail chain, and silent lute.

CHURCHILL'S GRAVE,

A FACT LITERALLY RENDERED.

I STOOD beside the grave of him who blazed
The comet of a season, and I saw

The humblest of all sepulchres, and gazed
With not the less of sorrow and of awe
On that neglected turf and quiet stone,
With name no clearer than the names unknown,
Which lay unread around it; and I ask'd
The gardener of that ground, which it might be
That for this plant strangers his memory task'd
Through the thick deaths of half a century?
And thus he answered - « Well, I do not know
Why frequent travellers turn to pilgrims so;

"

« He died before my day of sextonship,

« And I had not the digging of this

grave. » And is this all? I thought, and do we rip

The veil of Immortality? and crave

I know not what of honour and of light
Through unborn ages, to endure this blight?
So soon and so successless? As I said,
The Architect of all on which we tread,
For Earth is but a tombstone, did essay
To extricate remembrance from the clay,
Whose minglings might confuse a Newton's thought
Were it not that all life must end in one,

Of which we are but dreamers; as he caught
As 'twere the twilight of a former Sun,
Thus spoke he, -« I believe the man of whom
་ You wot, who lies in this selected tomb,

« Was a most famous writer in his day,

And therefore travellers step from out their way
To pay him honour, and myself whate'er

<< Your honour pleases, »then most pleased I shook From out my pocket's avaricious nook

Some certain coins of silver, which as 'twere
Perforce I gave this man, though I could spare
So much but inconveniently ;-Ye smile,
I see ye, ye profane ones! all the while,
Because my homely phrase the thruth would tell,
You are the fools, not I-for I did dwell
With a deep thought, and with a soften'd eye,
On that old Sexton's natural homily,

In which there was obscurity and fame,
The glory and the nothing of a name.

PROMETHEUS.

I.

TITAN! to whose immortal eyes
The sufferings of mortality,
Seen in their sad reality,

Were not as things that gods despise;
What was thy pity's recompense?
A silent suffering, and intense;

The rock, the vulture, and the chain,
All that the proud can feel of pain,
The agony they do not show,
The suffocating sense of woe,
Which speaks but in its loneliness,
And then is jealous lest the sky
Should have a listener, nor will sigh
Until its voice is echoless.

II.

Titan! to thee the strife was given
Between the suffering and the will,
Which torture where they cannot kill;
And the inexorable Heaven,
And the deaf tyranny of Fate,
The ruling principle of Hate,
Which for its pleasure doth create

The things it may annihilate,
Refused thee even the boon to die :

The wretched gift eternity

Was thine-and thou hast borne it well. All that the Thunderer wrung from thee Was but the menace which flung back On him the torments of thy rack;

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