THE CITY CHURCH-YARD.

The following imperfect Poem was written many years ago, to illustrate to a friend the influence which merely casual and external objects have in colouring our opinions respecting subjects of the last importance, and which ought, at least, to be beyond the reach of such influence. Although, in this respect, a failure-as a memento of past years to the friend alluded to, and as a record of one among many pleasant melancholy hours spent in the Grey Friar's Church Yard, Edinburgh, I hope I shall be forgiven for giving it a place here.

A single solitary man

Among the city graves!

Where, group'd together, peaceful lie

The dust of old nobility,

And the ashes of their slaves

So still, they seem to Fancy's eye

A sea of silent waves !

An ancient church, with all its towers
And pinnacles, whose gloomy splendour
Before the gazer darkly lowers,

In calm and cloudy grandeur.

Beauty and rank, and men whose names
Recall the time of torture, flames,

And Martyr's persecution,
Blended in death, do peaceful lie
Like children of one family-
In strange but sweet confusion.

F

For surely it is beautiful
That those estranged in life,
Unfaithful friends or enemies,

In death should cease their strife,
And mingle, 'neath the funeral pall,
Their hate and fiercer passions all.

Amid a scene like this he stood
A melancholy man !

Though youthful passions in his blood
Ran riot, oft unblest and rude,

Yet sober thought in solemn mood
Amid his musings ran.

He stood beside the murderer's grave,

Where the gray and wrinkled stone,

Told of a tale too dark to hear,

Imaged a scene almost too drear
For man to gaze upon.

Three sisters fair and beautiful
Stood on a pedestal-

Their murder'd father lay beneath;
Peaceful he lay, with sculptur'd wreath,
And carved with hollow skull,

While letters quaint, on the mouldering wall,
The dark and fearful tale recall:

How they for love of sordid gold,

And man's unblest embrace,
Had slain the old man in his sleep!

And then the faithful marble told

How justice met them face to face, With vengeance swift and deep;

For, on the fatal gallows tree,

Died in their youth, these sisters three.
And how the mob sent forth a yell,
Even in their dying hour-
A sound like a welcoming to hell,
Of demons dark and terrible;

Such was the nameless power
Of the fierce, deep, and vengeful cry,
That cheer'd them to eternity!

Another tomb!- -a new-fill'd grave,
And pure as the May moon-light,-
The marble rises o'er the bed

Where sleeps the sleep of endless night
A young and pure and lovely maid,

Who never had known remorse or crime,
A perished flower in the young spring-time!

But who can tell the nameless throng,

Of high and low degree,

That slept these church-yard mounds among,

Still as a waveless sea!

Amid this scene, where noisy Folly

Ne'er stood with step profane,

But calm and sombre Melancholy

For ever holds her reign, Stalk'd the sad, solitary man,

And thus his moody musings ran :—

"Oh! surely virtue is a name,

And beauty is a dream—

And hate and love, and bliss and woe,
But bubbles on life's stream,
Before whose wild impetuous flow

These transient air-bells burst and die,
While still the stream doth sweep on to Eternity.
The meanest reptile that around

This dank and loamy charnel-ground

Doth crawl, in the splashing rain,

Howe'er in life our race beneath,

Seemeth to equal us in death.

Oh! then, how false and vain,

To pride ourselves on the fleshly form

That rotteth as fast as the slimy worm;

Or to speak of the spirit that never can die,
That the toad may not possess-

For, see! together the reptiles lie

In kindred rottenness!

Then why should we precedence claim

O'er that which moulders in death the same?

"The intellectual ray less bright,

Less pure, and clear, and strong,

Hath been poured by the Father of mental light

Upon the reptile throng;

Yet still though dim to the human sense,

"Tis a ray of the same intelligence!

"Around each vaulted mouldering wall, How many names have faded away! If grief could die, her funeral

Should be chaunted beneath oblivion's pall,

Amid these tomb-stones gray.

Where the dead and the mourners' words of woe, A sister's or husband's lines of love,

That told who slept in peace below,

Untraced, unknown, are mouldering slow,

And the rank grass waving above

What is the history of the world?
The Epitaph of ages past!

Each page is but a church-yard stone,
That telleth of kingdoms, one by one,

In the shadows of death o'ercast;
Their pride and power, and victories all,
Shrunk to a scarce remember'd scrawl."

The stranger cast him on the ground,
And he prayed for speedy death;
For when he gazed on each heaving mound,
And knew these mounds beneath,

The beautiful of ages gone

Were mouldering slowly, bone by bone,