Poems From The Breakfast Table | Page 2

dark,
We'll trim our broad sail as before,
And stand
by the rudder that governs the bark,
Nor ask how we look from the
shore!
MUSA
O MY lost beauty!--hast thou folded quite
Thy wings of morning
light
Beyond those iron gates
Where Life crowds hurrying to 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