Sea-girt city! thou hast been
Ocean's child, and then his queen;
Now is come a darker day,
And thou soon must be his prey,
If the power that raised thee here
Hallow so thy watery bier.
A less drear ruin then than now,
With thy conquest-branded brow
Stooping to the slave of slaves
From thy throne among the waves
Wilt thou be, when the sea-mew
Flies, as once before it flew,
O'er thine isles depopulate,
And all is in its ancient state,
Save where many a palace-gate
With green sea-flowers overgrown
Like a rock of ocean's own,
Topples o'er the abandon'd sea
As the tides change sullenly.
The fisher on his watery way,
Wandering at the close of day,
Will spread his sail and seize his oar,
Till he pass the gloomy shore,
Lest thy dead should from their sleep
Bursting o'er the starlight deep,
Lead a rapid masque of death
O'er the waters of his path.
Those who alone thy towers behold
Quivering through aërial gold,
As I now behold them here,
Would imagine not they were
Sepulchres, where human forms,
Like pollution-nourish'd worms
To the corpse of greatness cling,
Murder'd, and now mouldering:
But if Freedom should awake
In her omnipotence, and shake
From the Celtic Anarch's hold
All the keys of dungeons cold,
Where a hundred cities lie
Chain'd like thee, ingloriously,
Thou and all thy sister band
Might adorn this sunny land,
Twining memories of old time
With new virtues more sublime;
If not, perish thou and they,
Clouds which stain truth's rising day
By her sun consumed away,
Earth can spare ye; while like flowers,
In the waste of years and hours,
From your dust new nations spring
With more kindly blossoming.
From Lines written among the Euganean Hills.
THE LADY AND THE FLOWER GARDEN.
I doubt not the flowers of that garden sweet
Rejoiced in the sound of her gentle feet;
I doubt not they felt the spirit that came
From her glowing fingers through all their frame.
She sprinkled bright water from the stream
On those that were faint with the sunny beam;
And out of the cups of the heavy flowers
She emptied the rain of the thunder showers.
She lifted their heads with her tender hands,
And sustain'd them with rods and ozier bands;
If the flowers had been her own infants, she
Could never have nursed them more tenderly.
And all killing insects and gnawing worms,
And things of obscene and unlovely forms,
She bore in her basket of Indian woof,
Into the rough woods far aloof:
In a basket, of grasses and wild flowers full,
The freshest her gentle hands could pull
For the poor banish'd insects, whose intent,
Although they did ill, was innocent.
But the bee and the beamlike ephemeris,
Whose path is the lightning's, and soft moths that kiss The sweet lips of the flowers, and harm not, did she Make her attendant angels be.
many an antenatal tomb,
Where butterflies dream of the life to come,
She left clinging round the smooth and dark
Edge of the odorous cedar bark.
This fairest creature from earliest spring
Thus moved through the garden ministering
All the sweet season of summer tide,
And ere the first leaf look'd brown-she died!
From The Sensitive Plant.
We are as clouds that veil the midnight moon;
How restlessly they speed, and gleam, and quiver,
Streaking the darkness radiantly!-yet soon
Night closes round, and they are lost for ever:
Or like forgotten lyres, whose dissonant strings
Give various response to each varying blast,
To whose frail frame no second motion brings
One mood or modulation like the last.
We rest-a dream has power to poison sleep;
We rise one wandering thought pollutes the day;
We feel, conceive, or reason, laugh or weep;
Embrace fond woe, or cast our cares away:
It is the same!-For, be it joy or sorrow,
The path of its departure still is free:
Man's yesterday may ne'er be like his morrow;
Nought may endure but Mutability.
Tell me, thou star, whose wings of light
Speed thee in thy fiery flight,
In what cavern of the night
Will thy pinions close now?
Tell me, moon, thou pale and grey
Pilgrim of heaven's homeless way,
In what depth of night or day
Seekest thou repose now?
Weary wind, who wanderest
Like the world's rejected guest,
Hast thou still some secret nest
On the tree or billow?
THIS poet, like Bloomfield, whom he most nearly resembles, was born to an inheritance of poverty and hardship; and without the benefits of education, was obliged to struggle into notice, amidst difficulties under which multitudes possessed of equal natural capacities are never heard of except, perhaps, as "village Hampdens," or "mute inglorious Miltons." Clare was born at Helpstone, near Peterborough, Northamptonshire, in 1793; and in early age he learned to read by exhausting his strength in extra tasks, to procure the neces sary pittance for the schoolmaster. After this, a carefully hoarded shilling procured him a copy of Thomson's Seasons, and such was the inspiration he derived from the perusal of this work, that he composed verses without being able to purchase paper to transcribe them. In this manner he struggled onward in a career of humble and laborious toil, which was cheered by the visitations of the Muse, until his poems were published in a volume, which was received with such acceptance, that it went through several editions. Encouraged by the success of this attempt, several other volumes succeeded at intervals; but the nine days' wonder had ceased, and the public no longer felt interested in the lowly peasant of Northamptonshire, so that these works scarcely paid the expenses of publication. And yet, while his productions in their intrinsic merits are worthy of a high place in every collection of British Poetry, they are truly wonderful when we consider the circumstances under which they originated. Clare still continues in his original poverty, as a tiller of the ground, notwithstanding all that he has so worthily accomplished for a better destiny.
WINTER EVENING IN THE COUNTRY.
The sun is creeping out of sight
Behind the woods-whilst running night
Hastens to shut the day's dull eye,
And grizzle o'er the chilly sky.
Now maidens, fresh as summer roses,
Journeying from the distant closes,
Haste home with yokes and swinging pail:
The thresher, too, sets by his flail,
And leaves the mice at peace again
To fill their holes with stolen grain;
Whilst owlets, glad his toils are o'er,
Swoop by him as he shuts the door.
Bearing his hook beneath his arm,
The shepherd seeks the cottage warm;
And, weary in the cold to roam,
Scenting the track that leads him home,
His dog goes swifter o'er the mead,
Barking to urge his master's speed;
Then turns, and looks him in the face,
And trots before with mending pace,
Till, out of whistle from the swain,
He sits him down and barks again,
Anxious to greet the open'd door,
And meet the cottage-fire once more.
The shutter closed, the lamp alight,
The faggot chopt and blazing bright-
The shepherd now, from labour free,
Dances his children on his knee;
While, underneath his master's seat,
The tired dog lies in slumber sweet,
Starting and whimpering in his sleep,
Chasing still the straying sheep.
The cat's roll'd round in vacant chair,
Or leaping children's knees to lair-
Or purring on the warmer hearth
Sweet chorus to the cricket's mirth.
From January-Shepherd's Calendar.
EXPLODED FICTIONS OF CHILDHOOD.
Oh! Spirit of the days gone by-
Sweet childhood's fearful ecstacy!
The witching spells of winter nights,
Where are they fled with their delights?
When listening on the corner seat,
The winter evening's length to cheat,
I heard my mother's memory tell
Tales Superstition loves so well:-
Things said or sung a thousand times,
In simple prose or simpler rhymes!
Ah! where is page of poesy
So sweet as this was wont to be?
The magic wonders that deceived,
When fictions were as truths believed;
The fairy feats that once prevail'd,
Told to delight, and never fail'd;
Where are they now, their fears and sighs,
And tears from founts of happy eyes?
I read in books, but find them not,
For poesy hath its youth forgot;
I hear them told to children still,
But fear numbs not my spirits chill:
I still see faces pale with dread,
While mine could laugh at what is said;
See tears imagined woes supply,
While mine with real cares are dry.
Where are they gone?-the joys and fears,
The links, the life, of other years?
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