The tuneful morn arose with locks of light—­
  The ear that drank her music’s call was chill;
The eye that shone was sealed in endless night,
  And cold and still
The pulses stood that ’neath her gaze were wont to thrill.

With trees e’en like the sleeper’s honors sered
  And prows of galleys, like his bosom riven,
The melancholy pile of death was reared
  Aloft to heaven,
And on its pillared height the corpse to torches given.

From his meridian throne the eye of day
  Beheld the kindlings of the funeral fire,
Where, like a war-worn Roman chieftain, lay
  Upon his pyre
The poet of the broken heart and broken lyre.

On scented wings the sorrowing breezes came
  And fanned the blaze, until the smoke that rushed
In dusky volumes upward, lit with flame
  All redly blushed
Like Melancholy’s sombre cheek by weeping flushed.

And brother bards upon that lonely shore
  Were standing by, and wept as brightly burned
The pyre, till all the form they loved before,
  To ashes turned,
With incense, wine, and tears was sprinkled and inurned.

THE FOUNTAIN REVISITED.

Let the classic pilgrim rove,
  By Egeria’s fount to stand,
Or sit in Vancluse’s grot of love,
  Afar from his native land;
Let him drink of the crystal tides
  Of the far-famed Hippocrene,
Or list to the waves where Peneus glides
  His storied mounts between: 
But dearer than aught ’neath a foreign sky
  Is the fount of my native dell,
It has fairer charms for my musing eye
  For my heart a deeper spell.

Dear fount! what memories rush
  Through the heart and wildered brain,
As beneath the old beech I list to the gush
  Of thy sparkling waves again;
For here in a fairy dream
  With friends, my childhood’s hours
Glided on like the flow of thy beautiful stream,
  And like it were wreathed with flowers: 
Here we saw on thy waves, from the shade,
  The dance of the sunbeams at noon;
Or heard, half-afraid, the deep murmurings made
  In thy cavernous depths, ’neath the moon.

I have heard thy waves away
  From thy scenes, dear fount, apart;
And have felt the play, in life’s fevered day,
  Of thy waters through my heart;
But oh! thou art not the same: 
  Youth’s friends are gone—­I am lone—­
Thy beeches are carved with many a name
  Now graved on the funeral stone. 
As I stand and muse, my tears
  Are troubling the stream whose waves
The lullaby sang to their infantile years,
  And now murmur around their graves.

DEATH OF SAMSON.

  Within Philistia’s princely hall
  Is held a glorious festival,
  And on the fluctuant ether floats
  The music of the timbrel’s notes,
While living waves of voices gush,
  Echoing among the distant hills,
Like an impetuous torrent’s rush
  When swollen by a thousand rills.