HYMN TO DEATH

OH! could I hope the wise and pure in heart

Might hear my song without a frown, nor deem

My voice unworthy of the theme it tries, I would take up the hymn to Death, and say

To the grim power, The world hath slandered thee

And mocked thee. On thy dim and shadowy brow

They place an iron crown, and call thee king Of terrors, and the spoiler of the world, Deadly assassin, that strik'st down the fair, The loved, the good — that breathest on the lights

Wrung from the o'er-worn poor. The perjurer,

Whose tongue was lithe, e'en now, and voluble

Against his neighbor's life, and he who

laughed

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And leaped for joy to see a spotless fame
Blasted before his own foul calumnies,
Are smit with deadly silence. He, who
sold

His conscience to preserve a worthless life,
Even while he hugs himself on his escape,
Trembles, as, doubly terrible, at length,
Thy steps o'ertake him, and there is no time
For parley, nor will bribes unclench thy
grasp.

Oft, too, dost thou reform thy victim, long Ere his last hour. And when the reveller, Mad in the chase of pleasure, stretches on, And strains each nerve, and clears the path

ΙΟΙ

Of heart and violent of hand restores The treasure to the friendless wretch he wronged.

Then from the writhing bosom thou dost pluck

The guilty secret; lips, for ages sealed, Are faithless to their dreadful trust at length,

And give it up; the felon's latest breath Absolves the innocent man who bears his crime;

The slanderer, horror-smitten, and in tears,
Recalls the deadly obloquy he forged
To work his brother's ruin. Thou dost
make

Thy penitent victim utter to the air
The dark conspiracy that strikes at life,

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? The mountain called by this name is a remarkable precipice in Great Barrington, overlooking the rich and picturesque valley of the Housatonie, in the western part of Massachusetts. At the southern extremity is, or was a few years since, a conical pile of small stones, erected, according to the tradition of the surrounding country, by the Indians, in memory of a woman of the Stockbridge tribe who killed herself by leaping from the edge of the precipice. Until within a few years past, small parties of that tribe used to arrive from their settlement in the western part of the State of New York, on visits to Stockbridge, the place of their nativity and former residence. A young woman belonging to one of these parties related, to a friend of the author, the story on which the poem of Monument Mountain' is founded. An Indian girl had formed an attachment for her cousin, which, according to the customs of the tribe, was unlawful. She was, in consequence, seized with a deep melancholy, and resolved to destroy herself. In company with a female friend, she repaired to the mountain, decked out for the occasion in all her ornaments, and, after passing the day on the summit in singing with her companion the traditional songs of her nation, she threw herself headlong from the rock, and was killed. (BRYANT.)

Upon the green and rolling forest-tops, And down into the secrets of the glens, And streams that with their bordering thickets strive

To hide their windings. Thou shalt gaze, at once,

Here on white villages, and tilth, and herds, And swarming roads, and there on solitudes

That only hear the torrent, and the wind, And eagle's shriek. There is a precipice 20 That seems a fragment of some mighty wall,

Built by the hand that fashioned the old world,

To separate its nations, and thrown down When the flood drowned them. To the north, a path

Conducts you up the narrow battlement. Steep is the western side, shaggy and wild

With mossy trees, and pinnacles of flint, And many a hanging crag. But, to the east,

Sheer to the vale go down the bare old cliffs

Huge pillars, that in middle heaven upbear

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