Solicitation of a mother's tears,
And the perpetual siege of fancies fair
Reflected from old days of happiness,
With Babel dissonance her heart assailing,
Made misery many-faced-a hideous dream-
A monster multiform-a dizzy round
Of aye-revolving aspects-woeful all.
Sweet Susan ever was a lowly maid,
Unpractised in the arts of maiden scorn;
Yet she could teach "her sorrow to be proud,"
And walk the earth in virgin majesty,
As one who owed no homage to its rules,
No tribute to its faithless flattery.
She loved her silent, solitary woe,
And thought, poor soul! all nature sympathized
With her lone sorrow. Every playful breeze
That dallied with the moonlight on the leaves,
Sung mournful solace to her wounded spirit,
As if it were indeed a mournful sound,
Mournfully kind. The gladsome nightingale,
That finds the day too short for half her bliss,
And warbles on, when all the tuneful grove
Is silent as the music of the spheres,
Sounded to her like wakeful melancholy
Dwelling on themes of old departed joy.
The nightingale grew dumb-the cuckoo fled—
And broad-eyed Summer glared on hill and plain—
And still no word. Was Leonard dead, or flown
Before the swallow? Doth he dwell forlorn
As the last primrose in the shadowy glade,
That bloom'd too late, and must too soon decline?
The birds are silent, and the shallow brook
Is hardly heard beneath the dark, dark weight
Of over-roofing boughs? And is he gone-
Gone like the riotous waters of the rill,
That smoking, gleaming, whitening on their way,
Display'd an earth-born Iris to the sun,
And in their beauty and their pride exhaled ?
Ah no! He lives, in sunless prison pent,
Watching the death-bed of his prison'd sire;
Who, on low pallet stretch'd, in noisome den,
Scarce wider than a captive lion's cage,
Breathes the mephitic and incarcerate fog
That morn not freshens nor still even cools:
His dosing slumbers broke with clank of chains,
And felons' curses, and the horrid mirth
Of reckless misery. Beside him sat
His once gay consort, squalid now, and lost
To self-respect, with grey dishevell❜d locks,
All loosely wrapt in rags of silk array
Her aspect, channell❜d with impatient tears ;
Now sullen mute, now loud in wordy woe,
Chiding the murmurs of her gasping spouse,
And the meek patience of her boy. 'Twas well
The poor old man heard little, nothing mark'd,
For drowsy death lay heavy at the gates
Of outward sense, and the beleaguered brain
Refused its office. Long he lay, and seem'd
A moving, panting corse, without a mind,
By some foul necromancer's horrid charm
In life detain'd. No word to living soul
He spake, and though he sometimes mutter'd prayers,
His understanding pray'd not. Leonard pray'd—
But silent as the voiceless intercourse
Of spirits bodiless-whose every thought
Is adoration. Not in Heaven unmark'd
The mute petition. Sudden as the gleam
Of heavenly visitation, a new light,
A glory settled on the pallid face
Of Leonard's sire. The dull unmeaning eye
Of dotage and disease, in rapture fixt,
Glow'd with a saintly fire. The imprison'd soul,
As rushing gladly to its dungeon doors,
Peer'd out, and look'd abroad—one moment-then
Ecstatic flew. "I am going to leave thee, boy—
I thought to leave thee in far other plight—
But that which is, must be. Unseemly 'twere
To see a dying father claim his son's
Forgiveness else might I implore of thee
To spare thy foolish father's memory—
The world will deal ungently with my name,
But, Leonard, never let thy heart consent
To the blind, coward, malice of the crowd-
And if the prayer of thy father's spirit
Be heard in Paradise, my soul shall pray,
Even at the foot of the Almighty's throne,
For thy best welfare. Good it is that thou
Hast been afflicted in thy lusty youth,
So happier days shall close thine honour'd age-
And, dear my child, I am in haste to Heaven;
My sin is pardon'd, and a mystic robe
Of woof celestial decks my better part.
But my poor limbs-far from the reverend dust
Of my dead ancestry-without a chaunt,
Hatchment, or hearse, or green memorial sprigs
Of shiver'd box-wood, and sweet rosemary,
Must soon be earth'd up in a vulgar grave.
The hireling shepherd of this wretched fold
Will hurry o'er his ill-paid task of prayer-
And I shall be forgot. But when the smile
Of Fortune shall repay thy honest toil,
Restore thy father's relics to the home
Of thy forefathers' bones. Thy mother-know
She is thy mother, and thy father's wife.
O God, receive my spirit!" Thus he spake—
Clasp'd his son's hand-and died without a groan.
Did Leonard weep? Oh, no; he knew too well
The selfish baseness of a private woe—
He shed no tear upon the barren grave,
But cast a long, sad, yearning look to Heaven,
And thought of Susan and his sainted sire.
There is a spell in patient filial love,
Can charm the deafest and the hardest heart,
And e'en relax the gripe of hungry law.
So the bleak mercy of a liberal age,
Dismiss'd poor Leonard, and his mother, mark'd With branded and convicted poverty,
From the ungenial refuge of a gaol
Into the general air.
The day-dawn creeping gradual o'er the sky :
The silent sun at noon is bright and fair,
And the calm eve is lovely; but 'tis sad
To sink at eve on the dark dewy turf,
And feel that none in all the countless host
Of glimmering stars beholds one little spot,
One humble home of thine. The vast void sky,
In all its trackless leagues of azure light,
Has not one breath of comfort for the wretch
Whom houseless penury enfranchises,
A brother freeman of the midnight owl,
A sworn acquaintance of the howling winds
And flaggy-pinion'd rain. Now Leonard leaves
The prison gates ;—but whither will he go?
Must he, the high-born, high-soul'd youth, implore
The stinted kindness of offended kin—
Crave pardon for the deadly sin of need;
And wrench from shame, not love, a pittance less
Than goes to feed the hounds? This he must do,
Or eat the bread of loathsome beggary;
For though he did not scorn the honest plough,
He knew not how to guide it. Rustic churls
Bemock'd his threadbare, pale gentility,
And would not grant him leave to toil for hire.
Oh, cruel fate!—his spirit stoop'd to beg
A shelter for his mother-'Twas refused.
No matter-There was kindness in the clouds,
And son and mother lay secure, beneath
The sylvan roof of charitable boughs.
The Lady, proudest of the proud, forgot
Her in-bred pride, and wept consoling tears,
And praying-pour'd a blessing on her child.
There is more mercy in the merciful God
Than e'er inhabited the pregnant eyes
Of men, who waste unprofitable tears
For all imaginable woes, and leave
The poor uncomforted, to wail their own.
There came a kinsman from a foreign land,
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