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
RODMAN DRAKE

GREEN be the turf above thee,
Friend of my better days!
None knew thee but to love thee,
Nor named thee but to praise.

Tears fell when thou wert dying,
From eyes unused to weep,
And long, where thou art lying,
Will tears the cold turf steep.

When hearts, whose truth was proven,
Like thine, are laid in earth,
There should a wreath be woven

To tell the world their worth;

And I who woke each morrow
To clasp thy hand in mine,
Who shared thy joy and sorrow,
Whose weal and woe were thine;

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,
Nor thoughts nor words are free, -
The grief is fixed too deeply
That mourns a man like 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,
Lovely in England's fadeless green,
To meet the quiet stream which winds
Through this romantic scene

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
A thousand years ago.

Gaze on the Abbey's ruined pile:
Does not the succoring ivy, keeping
Her watch around it, seem to smile,
As o'er a loved one sleeping?
One solitary turret gray

Still tells, in melancholy glory,
The legend of the Cheviot day,

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 babe and sire, the old, the young,
And the monk's hymn and minstrel's
song,

And woman's pure kiss, sweet and long,
Welcomed her warrior home.

--

That last half stanza it has dashed
From my warm lips the sparkling cup;
The light that o'er my eyebeam flashed,
The power that bore my spirit up
Above this bank-note world is gone;
And Alnwick's but a market town,
And this, alas! its market day,
And beasts and borderers throng the way;
Oxen and bleating lambs in lots,
Northumbrian boors and plaided Scots,

Men in the coal and cattle line;
From Teviot's bard and hero land,
From royal Berwick's beach of sand,
From Wooller, Morpeth, Hexham, and
Newcastle-upon-Tyne.

These are not the romantic times
So beautiful in Spenser's rhymes,

So dazzling to the dreaming boy:
Ours are the days of fact, not fable,
Of knights, but not of the round table,
Of Bailie Jarvie, not Rob Roy:
"T is what "our President" Monroe

Has called "the era of good feeling":
The Highlander, the bitterest foe
To modern laws, has felt their blow,
Consented to be taxed, and vote,
And put on pantaloons and coat,

And leave off cattle-stealing:
Lord Stafford mines for coal and salt,
The Duke of Norfolk deals in malt,

The Douglas in red herrings;
And noble name and cultured land,
Palace, and park, and vassal-band,
Are powerless to the notes of hand
Of Rothschild or the Barings.

The age of bargaining, said Burke,
Has come: to-day the turbaned Turk
(Sleep, Richard of the lion heart!
Sleep on, nor from your cerements start)
Is England's friend and fast ally;
The Moslem tramples on the Greek,

And on the Cross and altar-stone,
And Christendom looks tamely on,
And hears the Christian maiden shriek,
And sees the Christian father die;
And not a sabre-blow is given
For Greece and fame, for faith and heaven,
By Europe's craven chivalry.

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
In the drab coat of William Penn;

A chambermaid, whose lip and eye, And check, and brown hair, bright and curling,

Spoke Nature's aristocracy;

And one, half groom, half seneschal,
Who bowed me through court, bower, and
hall,

From donjon-keep to turret wall,
For ten-and-sixpence sterling.

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,
His monument - - that tells to Heaven
The homage of earth's proudest isle
To that Bard-peasant given !

Bid thy thoughts hover o'er that spot,
Boy-minstrel, in thy dreaming hour;
And know, however low his lot,
A Poet's pride and power:

The pride that lifted Burns from earth,
The power that gave a child of song
Ascendency o'er rank and birth,
The rich, the brave, the strong;

And if despondency weigh down
Thy spirit's fluttering pinions then,
Despair thy name is written on

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.

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
Before its spell with willing knee,
And listened, and believed, and felt
The Poet's mastery

O'er the mind's sea, in calm and storm,
O'er the heart's sunshine and its showc
O'er Passion's moments bright and war
O'er Reason's dark, cold hours;

On fields where brave men "die or do,"

In halls where rings the banquet's mirth,