Poems From The Breakfast Table | Page 2

the haggard Fates,?And Age upon his mound of ashes waits?To chill our fiery dreams,?Hot from the heart of youth plunged in his icy streams?
Leave me not fading in these weeds of care,?Whose flowers are silvered hair!?Have I not loved thee long,?Though my young lips have often done thee wrong,?And vexed thy heaven-tuned ear with careless song??Ah, wilt thou yet return,?Bearing thy rose-hued torch, and bid thine altar burn?
Come to me!--I will flood thy silent shrine?With my soul's sacred wine,?And heap thy marble floors?As the wild spice-trees waste their fragrant stores,?In leafy islands walled with madrepores?And lapped in Orient seas,?When all their feathery palms toss, plume-like, in the breeze.
Come to me!--thou shalt feed on honeyed words,?Sweeter than song of birds;--?No wailing bulbul's throat,?No melting dulcimer's melodious note?When o'er the midnight wave its murmurs float,?Thy ravished sense might soothe?With flow so liquid-soft, with strain so velvet-smooth.
Thou shalt be decked with jewels, like a queen,?Sought in those bowers of green?Where loop the clustered vines?And the close-clinging dulcamara twines,--?Pure pearls of Maydew where the moonlight shines,?And Summer's fruited gems,?And coral pendants shorn from Autumn's berried stems.
Sit by me drifting on the sleepy waves,--?Or stretched by grass-grown graves,?Whose gray, high-shouldered stones,?Carved with old names Life's time-worn roll disowns,?Lean, lichen-spotted, o'er the crumbled bones?Still slumbering where they lay?While the sad Pilgrim watched to scare the wolf away.
Spread o'er my couch thy visionary wing!?Still let me dream and sing,--?Dream of that winding shore?Where scarlet cardinals bloom-for me no more,--?The stream with heaven beneath its liquid floor,?And clustering nenuphars?Sprinkling its mirrored blue like golden-chaliced stars!
Come while their balms the linden-blossoms shed!--?Come while the rose is red,--?While blue-eyed Summer smiles?On the green ripples round yon sunken piles?Washed by the moon-wave warm from Indian isles,?And on the sultry air?The chestnuts spread their palms like holy men in prayer!
Oh for thy burning lips to fire my brain?With thrills of wild, sweet pain!--?On life's autumnal blast,?Like shrivelled leaves, youth's passion-flowers are cast,-- Once loving thee, we love thee to the last!--?Behold thy new-decked shrine,?And hear once more the voice that breathed "Forever thine!"
A PARTING HEALTH
TO J. L. MOTLEY
YES, we knew we must lose him,--though friendship may claim To blend her green leaves with the laurels of fame;?Though fondly, at parting, we call him our own,?'T is the whisper of love when the bugle has blown.
As the rider that rests with the spur on his heel,?As the guardsman that sleeps in his corselet of steel,?As the archer that stands with his shaft on the string,?He stoops from his toil to the garland we bring.
What pictures yet slumber unborn in his loom,?Till their warriors shall breathe and their beauties shall bloom, While the tapestry lengthens the life-glowing dyes?That caught from our sunsets the stain of their skies!
In the alcoves of death, in the charnels of timd,?Where flit the gaunt spectres of passion and crime,?There are triumphs untold, there are martyrs unsung,?There are heroes yet silent to speak with his tongue!
Let us hear the proud story which time has bequeathed!?From lips that are warm with the freedom they breathed!?Let him summon its tyrants, and tell us their doom,?Though he sweep the black past like Van Tromp with his broom!
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
The dream flashes by, for the west-winds awake?On pampas, on prairie, o'er mountain and lake,?To bathe the swift bark, like a sea-girdled shrine,?With incense they stole from the rose and the pine.
So fill a bright cup with the sunlight that gushed?When the dead summer's jewels were trampled and crushed:?THE TRUE KNIGHT OF LEARNING,--the world holds him dear,--?Love bless him, Joy crown him, God speed his career!
1857.
WHAT WE ALL THINK
THAT age was older once than now,?In spite of locks untimely shed,?Or silvered on the youthful brow;?That babes make love and children wed.
That sunshine had a heavenly glow,?Which faded with those "good old days"?When winters came with deeper snow,?And autumns with a softer haze.
That--mother, sister, wife, or child--?The "best of women" each has known.?Were school-boys ever half so wild??How young the grandpapas have grown!
That but for this our souls were free,?And but for that our lives were blest;?That in some season yet to be?Our cares will leave us time to rest.
Whene'er we groan with ache or pain,--?Some common ailment of the race,--?Though doctors think the matter plain,--?That ours is "a peculiar case."
That when like babes with fingers burned?We count one bitter maxim more,?Our lesson all the world has learned,?And men are wiser than before.
That when we sob o'er fancied woes,?The angels hovering overhead?Count every pitying drop that flows,?And love us for the tears we shed.
That when we stand with tearless eye?And turn the beggar from our door,?They still approve us when we sigh,?"Ah, had I but one thousand more!"
Though temples crowd the crumbled brink?O'erhanging truth's eternal flow,?Their tablets bold with what we think,?Their echoes dumb