As wild his thoughts, and gay of They conquered - but Bozzaris fell, stood, Bleeding at every vein. His few surviving comrades saw His smile when rang their proud hur rah, And the red field was won: Then saw in death his eyelids close There had the glad earth drunk their Come to the bridal chamber, Death! Come to the mother's, when she Thy voice sounds like a prophet's And even she who gave thee birth, word; And in its hollow tones are heard The thanks of millions yet to be. Come, when his task of fame is wrought Come with her laurel-leaf, bloodbought Come in her crowning hour-and then Thy sunken eye's unearthly light Of sky and stars to prisoned men; And orange-groves, and fields of balm, Blew o'er the Haytien seas. less tree, 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 poets' lyre is wreathed, Her marble wrought, her music breathed: For thee she rings the birthday bells; Of thee her babes' first lisping tells: For thine her evening prayer is said At palace couch, and cottage bed; Her soldier, closing with the foe, 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, 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. BURNS. WILD rose of Alloway! my thanks; Thou mind'st me of that autumn noon When first we met upon "the banks And braes o' 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 will not thy death-doom be mine The doom of all things wrought of clay? And withered my life's leaf like thine, Wild rose of Alloway? Not so his memory for whose sake My bosom bore thee far and long, His, who a humbler flower could make Immortal as his song. The memory of Burns. -a name That calls, when brimmed her fes- A nation's glory-be the rest We may of humankind. I've stood beside the cottage-bed Where the bard-peasant first drew breath; A straw-thatched roof above his And who hath heard his song, nor Yet read the names that know not death; Few nobler ones than Burns are And when he breathes his master-lay Of Alloway's witch-haunted wall, All passions in our frames of clay Come thronging at his call. Imagination's world of air, And our own world, its gloom and Wit, pathos, poetry, are there, And Burns, though brief the race he ran, Though rough and dark the path he trod Lived, died, in form and soul a man, The image of his God. |