And thou art terrible the tear,

The groan, the knell, the pall, the bier,
And all we know, or dream, or fear
Of agony, are thine.

But to the hero, when his sword

Has won the battle for the free,

Thy voice sounds like a prophet's 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, blood-bought -
Come in her crowning hour — and then
Thy sunken eye's unearthly light
To him is welcome as the sight

Of sky and stars to prisoned men; Thy grasp is welcome as the hand Of brother in a foreign land; Thy summons welcome as the cry That told the Indian isles were nigh To the world-seeking Genoese, When the land wind, from woods of palm, And orange-groves, and fields of balm, Blew o'er the Haytian seas.

Bozzaris! with the storied brave

Greece nurtured in her glory's time, Rest thee there is no prouder grave,

Even in her own proud clime.

She wore no funeral-weeds for thee,

Nor bade the dark hearse wave its plume Like torn branch from death's leafless 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 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 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,
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.

CHARLES WOLFE

(1791-1823)

THE BURIAL OF SIR JOHN MOORE AT CORUNNA

NOT a drum was heard, not a funeral note,
As his corpse to the rampart we hurried ;
Not a soldier discharged his farewell shot
O'er the grave where our hero we buried.

We buried him darkly at dead of night,
The sods with our bayonets turning;
By the struggling moonbeam's misty light
And the lantern dimly burning.

No useless coffin enclosed his breast,

Not in sheet nor in shroud we wound him; But he lay like a warrior taking his rest, With his martial cloak around him.

Few and short were the prayers we said,

And we spoke not a word of sorrow;

But we steadfastly gazed on the face that was dead, And we bitterly thought of the morrow.

We thought as we hollow'd his narrow bed
And smoothed down his lonely pillow,

That the foe and the stranger would tread o'er his head,
And we far away on the billow!

Lightly they'll talk of the spirit that's gone
And o'er his cold ashes upbraid him,

But little he'll reck, if they let him sleep on
In the grave where a Briton has laid him.

But half of our heavy task was done

When the clock struck the hour for retiring; And we heard the distant and random gun That the foe was sullenly firing.

Slowly and sadly we laid him down,

From the field of his fame fresh and gory; We carved not a line, and we raised not a stone But we left him alone with his glory.

WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT

(1794-1878)

THANATOPSIS

Written in the poet's eighteenth year.

'To him who in the love of Nature holds
Communion with her visible forms, she speaks
A various language; for his gayer hours
She has a voice of gladness, and a smile
And eloquence of beauty, and she glides
Into his darker musings, with a mild
And healing sympathy, that steals away
Their sharpness, ere he is aware.
When thoughts
Of the last bitter hour come like a blight
Over thy spirit, and sad images

Of the stern agony, and shroud, and pall,
And breathless darkness, and the narrow house,
Make thee to shudder, and grow sick at heart;
Go forth, under the open sky, and list

To Nature's teachings, while from all around-
Earth and her waters, and the depths of air-

Yet a few days, and thee

The all-beholding sun shall see no more

In all his course; nor yet in the cold ground,
Where thy pale form was laid, with many tears,
Nor in the embrace of ocean, shall exist

Thy image. Earth, that nourished thee, shall claim
Thy growth, to be resolved to earth again,
And, lost each human trace, surrendering up
Thine individual being, shalt thou go

To mix for ever with the elements,

To be a brother to the insensible rock

And to the sluggish clod, which the rude swain
Turns with his share, and treads upon. The oak
Shall send his roots abroad, and pierce thy mould.

Yet not to thine eterna; resting-place
Shalt thou retire alone, nor couldst thou wish
Couch more magnificent. Thou shalt lie down
With patriarchs of the infant world — with kings,
The powerful of the earth the wise, the good,
Fair forms, and hoary seers of ages past,
All in one mighty sepulchre. The hills
Rock-ribbed and ancient as the sun, - the vales
Stretching in pensive quietness between ;
The venerable woods- rivers that move
In majesty, and the complaining brooks

That make the meadows green; and, poured round all,
Old Ocean's gray and melancholy waste,
Are but the solemn decorations all

Of the great tomb of man. The golden sun,
The planets, all the infinite host of heaven,
Are shining on the sad abodes of death,
Through the still lapse of ages. All that tread
The globe are but a handful to the tribes
That slumber in its bosom. Take the wings
Of morning, pierce the Barcan wilderness,
Or lose thyself in the continuous woods
Where rolls the Oregon, and hears no sound,

-

Save his own dashings — yet the dead are there:
And millions in those solitudes, since first

The flight of years began, have laid them down
In their last sleep - the dead reign there alone.
So shalt thou rest, and what if thou withdraw
In silence from the living, and no friend
Take note of thy departure? All that breathe
Will share thy destiny. The gay will laugh
When thou art gone, the solemn brood of care
Plod on, and each one as before will chase
His favorite phantom; yet all these shall leave
Their mirth and their employments, and shall come
And make their bed with thee. As the long train
Of ages glides away, the sons of men,
The youth in life's fresh spring, and he who goes
In the full strength of years, matron and maid,
The speechless babe, and the gray-headed man
Shall one by one be gathered to thy side,
By those who in their turn shall follow them.

So live, that when thy summons comes to join
The innumerable caravan, which moves

To that mysterious realm, where each shall take
His chamber in the silent halls of death,
Thou go not, like the quarry-slave at night,
Scourged to his dungeon, but, sustained and soothed
By an unfaltering trust, approach thy grave

Like one who wraps the drapery of his couch
About him, and lies down to pleasant dreams.

THE DEATH OF THE FLOWERS

THE melancholy days are come, the saddest of the year,
Of wailing winds, and naked woods, and meadows brown

and sere.

Heaped in the hollows of the grove, the autumn leaves lie dead;

They rustle to the eddying gust, and to the rabbit's tread; The robin and the wren are flown, and from the shrubs the jay,

And from the wood-top calls the crow through all the gloomy day.