Through toils that leave, when all is o'er, No living trace behind; But morn shall dawn, and the sea-grey man Shall not forgotten lie, When the ocean and the earth give up The treasures of the sky. JACOB'S LAMENT. And all his sons, and all his daughters rose up to comfort him; but he refused to be comforted.- Gen. xxxvii. 35. AH! woe to the day!-his existence is run, And its colours, so many, are all become dim, And where are the visions that came o'er his soul, In the day when they told of his powerful control; When the stars of his God condescended to show, That his father and brethren before him should bow? Alas! by wild beasts of the wilderness torn, The hope of my soul in his absence decays, And mourning falls deep with the close of my days! Let sackcloth and ashes be over mé spread, And control not the wail that awakes for the dead; Forbear-oh! forbear in essaying to give Relief to the woe which forbids me to live. Can mortals the dead to the living restore- These hairs of my head, into hoariness grown, With grief to the grave of my son shall go down; And the last falling drop of this dim eye shall be, A tear for the child that it never shall see! LINES WRITTEN AT THE GRAVE OF A FRIEND. STILL, still it is a lonely woe, And darkly to the spirit wed, That seeks and but relief can know, From brooding o'er the silent dead: Those who have been, with hopes and fears, The guardians of our early years; Who taught, and loved in us to see, Of Heaven, those who have left us here, Which theirs again can never know!— Where morning's voice, and evening's hum, For thou wert generous, warm, and free, There lives a sympathy apart From that which language may define, I would not tell thy worth to those, O'er whom no worth its halo throws Whose hearts no power 'neath heaven may make Their aims exalt, or them forsake ; |