Or unfold to our gaze thy most wonderful book,
So feared by hell and Satan;
At its hermits and martyrs in gold let us look,
At the virgins, and bishops with pastoral crook,
And the hymns and the prayers
in Latin.
Oft with legends of angels, who watch o’er the
young,
Thy voice was wont to gladden;
Have thy lips yet no language—no wisdom
thy tongue?
Oh, see! the light wavers, and sinking, bath flung
On the wall forms that sadden.
Wake! awake! evil spirits perhaps may presume
To haunt thy holy dwelling;
Pale ghosts are, perhaps, stealing into the room—
Oh, would that the lamp were relit! with the gloom
These fearful thoughts dispelling.
Thou hast told us our parents lie sleeping beneath
The grass, in a churchyard
lonely:
Now, thine eyes have no motion, thy mouth has no breath,
And thy limbs are all rigid! Oh, say, Is this
death,
Or thy prayer or thy slumber
only?
ENVOY.
Sad vigil they kept by that grandmother’s chair,
Kind angels hovered o’er
them—
And the dead-bell was tolled in the hamlet—and
there,
On the following eve, knelt that innocent pair,
With the missal-book before
them.
“FATHER PROUT” (FRANK S. MAHONY).
("Ho, guerriers! je suis ne dans le pays des Gaules.")
[V., March 11, 1825.]
Ho, warriors! I was reared in the land of the
Gauls;
O’er the Rhine my ancestors came bounding like
balls
Of the snow at the Pole, where, a babe, I was bathed
Ere in bear and in walrus-skin I was enswathed.
Then my father was strong, whom the years lowly bow,—
A bison could wallow in the grooves of his brow.
He is weak, very old—he can scarcely uptear
A young pine-tree for staff since his legs cease to
bear;
But here’s to replace him!—I can
toy with his axe;
As I sit on the hill my feet swing in the flax,
And my knee caps the boulders and troubles the trees.
How they shiver, yea, quake if I happen to sneeze!
I was still but a springald when, cleaving the Alps,
I brushed snowy periwigs off granitic scalps,
And my head, o’er the pinnacles, stopped the
fleet clouds,
Where I captured the eagles and caged them by crowds.
There were tempests! I blew them back into their
source!
And put out their lightnings! More than once
in a course,
Through the ocean I went wading after the whale,
And stirred up the bottom as did never a gale.
Fond of rambling, I hunted the shark ’long the
beach,
And no osprey in ether soared out of my reach;
And the bear that I pinched ’twixt my finger
and thumb,
Like the lynx and the wolf, perished harmless and
dumb.
But these pleasures of childhood have lost all their
zest;
It is warfare and carnage that now I love best:
The sounds that I wish to awaken and hear
Are the cheers raised by courage, the shrieks due
to fear;
