SUNDAY.

Come, thou blessed day of rest! 
Soother of the tortured breast,
Wearied souls release from toil,
Life’s eternal sad turmoil;
How I love thy tuneful bells
Which a welcome story tells! 
Bids the wanderer rest and pray
On this peaceful holy-day. 
All creation seems to pause—­
Man, uncatechized by laws,
Looks to God with grateful eyes,
In such blessed sympathies,
All his rebel nature dies! 
See the monster crime hath made,
Resting from his restless trade,
Unfit to live, afraid to die,
Hear his deep unconscious sigh,
See his former horrid mien,
Changed to the bright, serene,
View him on his BIBLE rest,
Care no longer gnaws his breast;
Heaven, in mercy, let him live,
Religion, such the peace you give!

A NIGHT-STORM.

Let this rough fragment lend its mossy seat;
Let Contemplation hail this lone retreat: 
Come, meek-eyed goddess, through the midnight gloom,
Born of the silent awe which robes the tomb! 
This gothic front, this antiquated pile,
The bleak wind howling through each mazy aisle;
Its high gray towers, faint peeping through the shade,
Shall hail thy presence, consecrated maid! 
Whether beneath some vaulted abbey’s dome,
Where ev’ry footstep sounds in every tomb;
Where Superstition, from the marble stone,
Gives every sound, a pilgrim-spirit’s groan: 
Pensive thou readest by the moon’s full glare
The sculptured children of Affection’s tear;
Or in the church-yard lone thou sitt’st to weep
O’er some sad wreck, beneath the tufty heap—­
Perchance some victim to Seduction’s spell,
Who yielded, wept, and then neglected fell!

But hither come, on yon swoln arch to gaze,
And view the vivid flash eruptive blare;
Light those high walls with transitory gleam,
Illume the air, and sparkle in the stream. 
Ah! look, where yonder tempest-shaken cloud,
Awful and black as the chaosian shroud,
Breaks, like the waves which lash the sandy shore,
And speaks its mission in a feeble row. 
Thus Meditation hears:  “Aspiring height! 
Of old, the splendid mansions of the great;
Thy fate (tremendous) lours upon the blast,
And waits to write on thy remains:—­’tis past! 
Oft have the genii of the hoary blade
Around thy walls their hell-born demons led;
Yet hast thou triumph’d o’er each monster’s car,
And braved the ills of pestilential war: 
Oft hast thou seen the circling seasons roll
In fond succession round thy native pole;
Defied the hoary matron of the ring,
And seen her sicken in the lap of Spring. 
But, ah! no more thy time-clad head shall rise
To dare the tempest, while it shakes the skies;
Nor one small wreck invade the fair concave,
Nor shout above its crumbling basis, Save! 
When rising zephyr from thy ruin brings
A world of atoms on its fairy wings.”