lie
She scatters snowdrops with their waxen leaves,
And all the while her troubled bosom heaves
In tenderness, with many a sorrowing sigh.

Out from the light, to where the cypress shade
In mournful darkness falls, a figure crept;
And as she knelt, the morning breezes swept
A cloud of hair about her drooping head.

Her feet were small and slender, bare and white--
White as the daisy-fringe on which she trod;
Like shimmering snowdrops in the greening sod,
Or glow-worms glistening in the Summer night.

And as deep down in gloomy chasms seen
By those up-looking, stars in daylight shine,
So shone the beauty of her face divine
In the dark shadows of the cypress green.

Her girlish hands a primrose wreath enwove,
With fingers deft, and eyes with tears bedimmed:
No lovelier face the painter's art e'er limned,
No poet's thought e'er told of sweeter love

Than that young mother's, as, with tender grace,
She kissed the chaplet ere she laid it down
Upon a tiny hillock, earthy-brown--
Of first and only child the resting place.

And then the few stray blossoms that were left
She kissed and strewed upon the little mound--
Looked lingering back towards the sacred ground,
As from the shade she bore her heart bereft.

As gentle ripples, from the side we lave
Of placid lake, will reach the other side,
So, o'er Death's river--silent, dark, and wide--
Blossoms may bear the kiss that mother gave.

Or, if in fervent faith she deemed it so,
The thought to joyless lives a pleasure brings,
And who shall tell, where doting fondness clings,
The loss which hearts bereaved can only know?

And who shall doubt that to such love is given,
Borne upward, clothed in perfume to the sky,
The pow'r to reach, in death's great mystery,
Lost hearts, and add a bliss to those of Heaven?

Other sad pilgrims came. A mother here
A duteous daughter mourns, whose days had been
A ceaseless blessing--an oasis green
On life's enfevered plain: a brooklet clear,

That ran the meadows of glad lives along,
Till, like a stream that meanders to the sea,
In the dark Ocean of Eternity
Lost was their source of laughter, light, and song.

And yonder, clothed in darksome silence, grieves
A loving daughter near a mother's tomb--
Down by the stunted wall in willow-gloom
And shadows thrown by sombre cypre