5. I curse thee by a parent's outraged love;
By hopes long cherished and too lately lost;
By gentle feelings thou couldst never prove;
By griefs which thy stern nature never crossed;
6. By those infantine smiles of happy light
Which were a fire within a stranger's hearth,
Quenched even when kindled, in untimely night
Hiding the promise of a lovely birth;
7. By those unpractised accents of young speech,
Which he who is a father thought to frame
To gentlest lore such as the wisest teach.
Thou strike the lyre of mind!
8. By all the happy see in children's growth, That undeveloped flower of budding years, Sweetness and sadness interwoven both,
Source of the sweetest hopes and saddest fears:
9. By all the days, under a hireling's care,
Of dull constraint and bitter heaviness-
Oh wretched ye if ever any were,
Sadder than orphans yet not fatherless
10. By the false cant which on their innocent lips
Must hang like poison on an opening bloom;
By the dark creeds which cover with eclipse
Their pathway from the cradle to the tomb;
11. By thy most impious hell, and all its terrors;
By all the grief, the madness, and the guilt
Of thine impostures, which must be their errors,
That sand on which thy crumbling power is built;
12. By thy complicity with lust and hate,
Thy thirst for tears, thy hunger after gold,
The ready frauds which ever on thee wait,
The servile arts in which thou hast grown old;
13. By thy most killing sneer, and by thy smile,
By all the acts and snares of thy black den,
And for thou canst outweep the crocodile-
By thy false tears, those millstones braining men;
14. By all the hate which checks a father's love;
By all the scorn which kills a father's care;
By those most impious hands that dared remove
Nature's high bounds; by thee; and by despair-
15. Yes, the despair which bids a father groan,
And cry,
My children are no longer mine
The blood within those veins may be mine own,
But, tyrant, their polluted souls are thine!"
16. I curse thee, though I hate thee not. O slave! If thou couldst quench the earth-consuming hell Of which thou art a demon, on thy grave
This curse should be a blessing. Fare thee well!
HE billows on the beach are leaping around it;
The bark is weak and frail;
The sea looks black, and the clouds that bound it
Darkly strew the gale.
Come with me, thou delightful child,
Come with me! Though the wave is wild,
And the winds are loose, we must not stay,
Or the slaves of law may rend thee away.
2. They have taken thy brother and sister dear,
They have made them unfit for thee;
They have withered the smile and dried the tear
Which should have been sacred to me.
To a blighting faith and a cause of crime
They have bound them slaves in youthly time;
And they will curse my name and thee
Because we fearless are and free.
3. Come thou, beloved as thou art!
Another sleepeth still
Near thy sweet mother's anxious heart,
Which thou with joy wilt fill,
With fairest smiles of wonder thrown
On that which is indeed our own,
And which in distant lands will be
The dearest playmate unto thee.
4. Fear not the tyrants will rule for ever,
Or the priests of the evil faith;
They stand on the brink of that raging river
Whose waves they have tainted with death.
It is fed from the depth of a thousand dells,
Around them it foams, and rages, and swells;
And their swords and their sceptres I floating see,
Like wrecks, on the surge of eternity.
5. Rest, rest, shriek not, thou gentle child! The rocking of the boat thou fearest,
And the cold spray and the clamour wild?
There! sit between us two, thou dearest-
Me and thy mother. Well we know
The storm at which thou tremblest so,
With all its dark and hungry graves,
Less cruel than the savage slaves
Who hunt thee o'er these sheltering waves.
6. This hour will in thy memory
Be a dream of days forgotten;
We soon shall dwell by the azure sea
Of serene and golden Italy,
Or Greece the mother of the free.
And I will teach thine infant tongue
To call upon their heroes old
In their own language, and will mould
Thy growing spirit in the flame
Of Grecian lore; that by such name
A patriot's birthright thou mayst claim.
HAT time is dead for ever, child,
Drowned, frozen, dead for ever!
We look on the past;
And stare aghast
At the spectres, wailing, pale, and ghast,
Of hopes which thou and I beguiled
To death on life's dark river.
The stream we gazed on then rolled by ;
Its waves are unreturning;
But we yet stand
Like tombs to mark the memory
Of hopes and fears which fade and fly
In the light of life's dim morning.
ON FANNY GODWIN.
ER voice did quiver as we parted ;
Yet knew I not that heart was broken
From which it came, and I departed
Heeding not the words then spoken.
Misery-Ö Misery,
This world is all too wide for thee!
ONEY from silkworms who can gather
Or silk from the yellow bee?
The grass may grow in winter weather
As soon as hate in me.
2. Hate men who cant, and men who pray,
And men who rail, like thee;
An equal passion to repay
They are not coy like me.
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