LEAVING THE OLD HOME.

257

LEAVING THE OLD HOME.

UNWATCH'D, the garden bough shall sway,

The tender blossom flutter down;

Unlov'd that beech will gather brown,
This maple burn itself away;

Unloved, the sun-flower, shining fair,

Ray round with flames her disc of seed,

And many a rose-carnation feed
With summer spice the humming air;

Unloved, by many a sandy bar,

The brook shall babble down the plain,

At noon or when the lesser wain
Is twisting round the polar star;

Uncared for, gird the windy grove

And flood the haunts of hern and crake;

Or into silver arrows break
The sailing moon in creek and cove;

Till from the garden and the wild

A fresh association blow,

And year by year the landscape grow
Familiar to the stranger's child;

As year by year the labourer tills

His wonted glebe, or lops the glades;

And year by year our memory fades
From all the circle of the hills.

A. Tennyson.
Modern Poets.

17

258

I REMEMBER, I REMEMBER.

I REMEMBER, I REMEMBER.

I REMEMBER, I remember,
The house where I was born,
The little window where the sun
Came peeping in at morn;
He never came a wink too soon,
Nor brought too long a day,
But now, I often wish the night
Had borne my breath away!

I remember, I remember,
The roses, red and white,
The violets, and the lily-cups,
Those flowers made of light!
The lilacs where the robin built,
And where my brother set
The laburnum on his birth-day,-
The tree is living yet!

I remember, I remember,
Where I was used to swing,
And thought the air must rush as fresh
To swallows on the wing;
My spirit flew in feathers then,
That is so heavy now,
And summer pools could hardly cool
The fever on my brow!

THE LIGHT OF OTHER DAYS.

259

I remember, I remember,
The fir trees dark and high;
I used to think their slender tops
Were close against the sky:
It was a childish ignorance,
But now 'tis little joy
To know I'm farther off from Heav'n
Than when I was a boy.

T. Hood.

THE LIGHT OF OTHER DAYS.

OFT in the stilly night

Ere slumber's chain has bound me,
Fond Memory brings the light
Of other days around me;

The smiles, the tears

Of boyhood's years,
The words of love then spoken

The eyes that shone,

Now dimm'd and gone,
The cheerful hearts now broken!
Thus in the stilly night

Ere slumber's chain has bound me,
Sad Memory brings the light

Of other days around me.

When I remember all

The friends so link'd together
I've seen around me fall
Like leaves in wintry weather,

I feel like one

Who treads alone
Some banquet-hall deserted,

Whose lights are fled,

Whose garlands dead, And all but he departed!

260

THE RECOLLECTION.

Thus in the stilly night

Ere slumber's chain has bound me,
Sad Memory brings the light
Of other days around me.

T. Moore.

THE RECOLLECTION.

Now the last day of many days
All beautiful and bright as thou,
The loveliest and the last, is dead,
Rise, Memory, and write its praise!
Up, do thy wonted work! come, trace
The epitaph of glory fled,
For now the Earth has changed its face.
A frown is on the Heaven's brow.

We wander'd to the Pine Forest

That skirts the Ocean's foam;
The lightest wind was in its nest,

The tempest in its home.
The whispering waves were half asleep,

The clouds were gone to play,
And on the bosom of the deep

The smile of Heaven lay;
It seem'd as if the hour were one

Sent from beyond the skies
Which scatter'd from above the sun

A light of Paradise!

We paused amid the pines that stood

The giants of the waste,
Tortured by storms to shapes as rude

As serpents interlaced,

THE RECOLLECTION.

261

And soothed by every azure breath

That under heaven is blown
To harmonies and hues beneath,

As tender as its own:
Now all the tree-tops lay asleep

Like green waves on the sea,
As still as in the silent deep

The ocean-woods may be.

How calm it was!-the silence there

By such a chain was bound, That even the busy woodpecker

Made stiller by her sound The inviolable quietness;

The breath of peace we drew With its soft motion made not less

The calm that round us grew.
There seem'd from the remotest seat

Of the wide mountain waste
To the soft flower beneath our feet

A magic circle traced,
A spirit interfused around,

A thrilling silent life;
To momentary peace it bound

Our mortal nature's strife;
And still I felt the centre of

The magic circle there
Was one fair Form that fill'd with love

The lifeless atmosphere.

We paused beside the pools that lie

Under the forest bough;
Each seem'd as 'twere a little sky

Gulf'd in a world below;