In death divided from their dearest kin,
  This is “a field to bury strangers in:” 
  Fragments lie here of families bereft,
  Like limbs in battle-grounds by warriors left;
  A sad community!—­whose very bones
  Might feel, methinks, a pang to quicken stones,
  And make them from the depths of darkness cry,
  “Oh! is it naught to you, ye passers by! 
  When from its earthly house the spirit fled,
  Our dust might not be ‘free among the dead?’
  Ah! why were we to this Siberia sent,
  Doom’d in the grave itself to banishment?”

    Shuddering humanity asks—­“Who are these? 
  And what their sin?”—­They fell by one disease! 
  (Not by the Proteus maladies, that strike
  Man into nothingness—­not twice alike;)
  By the blue pest, whose gripe no art can shun,
  No force unwrench—­out-singled one by one;
  When like a timeless birth, the womb of Fate
  Bore a new death, of unrecorded date,
  And doubtful name.  Far east its race begun,
  Thence round the world pursued the westering sun;
  The ghosts of millions following at its back,
  Whose desecrated graves betray’d their track;
  On Albion’s shore, unseen, the invader stept;
  Secret, and swift, and terrible it crept;
  At noon, at midnight, seized the weak, the strong,
  Asleep, awake, alone, amidst the throng,
  Kill’d like a murder; fix’d its icy hold,
  And wrung out life with agony of cold;
  Nor stay’d its vengeance where it crush’d the prey,
  But set a mark, like Cain’s, upon their clay,
  And this tremendous seal impress’d on all,
  “Bury me out of sight, and out of call.”

    Wherefore no filial foot this turf may tread,
  No kneeling mother clasp her baby’s bed;
  No maiden unespoused, with widow’d sighs,
  Seek her soul’s treasure where her true-love lies;
  —­All stand aloof, and gazing from afar,
  Look on this mount as on some baleful star,
  Strange to the heavens, that with bewildering light,
  Like a lost spirit, wanders through the night.

    Yet many a mourner weeps her fall’n estate,
  In many a home by them left desolate;
  Once warm with love, and radiant with the smiles
  Of woman, watching infants at their wiles,
  Whose eye of thought, while now they throng her knees,
  Pictures far other scene than that she sees,
  For one is wanting—­one, for whose dear sake,
  Her heart with very tenderness would ache,
  As now with anguish—­doubled when she spies
  In this his lineaments, in that his eyes,
  In each his image with her own commix’d,
  And there at least, for life, their union fix’d!

    Humanity again asks, “Who are these? 
  And what their sin?”—­They fell by one disease! 
  But when they knock’d for entrance at the tomb,
  Their fathers’ bones refused to make them room;
  Recoiling Nature from their presence fled,