In sorrow's pomp and pageantry, The heartless luxury of the tomb; But she remembers thee as one Long loved and for a season gone; For thee her poet's lyre is wreathed, Her marble wrought, her music breathed; For thee she rings the birthday bells; Of thee her babe's first lisping tells; For thine her evening prayer is said At palace-couch and cottage-bed; Her soldier, closing with the foc, Gives for thy sake a deadlier blow; His plighted maiden, when she fears For him the joy of her young years, Thinks of thy fate, and checks her tears; And she, the mother of thy boys, Though in her eye and faded cheek Is read the grief she will not speak, The memory of her buried joys, And even she who gave thee birth, Will, by their pilgrim-circled hearth, Talk of thy doom without a sigh; For thou art Freedom's now, and Fame's: One of the few, the immortal names, That were not born to die. ON THE DEATH OF JOSEPH GREEN be the turf above thee, Tears fell when thou wert dying, When hearts, whose truth was proven, To tell the world their worth; And I who woke each morrow It should be mine to braid it Around thy faded brow, But I've in vain essayed it, And feel I cannot now. While memory bids me weep thee, ALNWICK CASTLE HOME of the Percys' high-born race, Ilome of their beautiful and brave, Alike their birth and burial-place, Their cradle and their grave! Still sternly o'er the castle gate Their house's Lion stands in state, As in his proud departed hours; And warriors frown in stone on high, And feudal banners flout the sky Above his princely towers. A gentle hill its side inclines, As silently and sweetly still, As when at evening on that hill, While summer's wind blew soft and low, Seated by gallant Hotspur's side, Ilis Katherine was a happy bride Gaze on the Abbey's ruined pile: Still tells, in melancholy glory, The Percys' proudest border story. That day its roof was triumph's arch; Then rang from isle to pictured dome The light step of the soldier's march, The music of the trump and drum; And woman's pure kiss, sweet and long, -- That last half stanza it has dashed Men in the coal and cattle line; These are not the romantic times So dazzling to the dreaming boy: Has called "the era of good feeling": And leave off cattle-stealing: The Douglas in red herrings; The age of bargaining, said Burke, And on the Cross and altar-stone, You'll ask if yet the Percy lives In the armed pomp of feudal state? The present representatives Of Hotspur and his "gentle Kate " Are some half-dozen serving-men A chambermaid, whose lip and eye, And check, and brown hair, bright and curling, Spoke Nature's aristocracy; And one, half groom, half seneschal, From donjon-keep to turret wall, BURNS TO A ROSE, BROUGHT FROM NEAR ALLOWAY KIRK, IN AYRSHIRE, IN THE AUTUMN OF 1822 WILD Rose of Alloway! my thanks; Thou 'mindst me of that autumn noon When first we met upon "the banks And braes of bonny Doon." Like thine, beneath the thorn-tree's bough, My sunny hour was glad and brief; We've crossed the winter sea, and thou Art withered-flower and leaf. And I have stood beside the pile, Bid thy thoughts hover o'er that spot, The pride that lifted Burns from earth, And if despondency weigh down The roll of common men. There have been loftier themes than his, And longer scrolls, and louder lyres, And lays lit up with Poesy's Purer and holier fires: Yet read the names that know not death; Few nobler ones than Burus are there; And few have won a greener wreath Than that which binds his hair. And will not thy death-doom be mine- is that language of the heart, In which the answering heart would speak, Thought, word, that bids the warm tear start, Or the smile light the cheek; And his that music, to whose tone The common pulse of man keeps time, ¦ In cot or castle's mirth or moan, In cold or sunny clime. And who hath heard his song, nor knelt O'er the mind's sea, in calm and storm, On fields where brave men "die or do," In halls where rings the banquet's mirth, |