ty.

The marginal notes will be useless to such as have read much.

_San Patricio, Island of Cuba, March 30, 1825._

INVOCATION.

Thou with the dark blue eye upturned to heaven,
And cheek now pale, now warm with radiant glow,
Daughter of God,--most dear,--
Come with thy quivering tear,
And tresses wild, and robes of loosened flow,--
To thy lone votaress let one look be given!

Come Poesy! nor like some just-formed maid,
With heart as yet unswoln by bliss or woe;--
But of such age be seen
As Egypt's glowing queen,
When her brave Roman learned to love her so
That death and loss of fame, were, by a smile, repaid.

Or as thy Sappho, when too fierce assailed
By stern ingratitude her tender breast:--
Her love by scorn repaid
Her friendship true betrayed,
Sick of the guileful earth, she sank for rest
In the cold waves embrace; while Grecian muse bewailed.

Be to my mortal eye, like some fair dame--
Ripe, but untouched by time; whose frequent blush
Plays o'er her cheek of truth
As soft as earliest youth;
While thoughts exalted to her mild eye rush--
And the expanded soul, tells 'twas from heaven it came.

Daughter of life's first cause; who, when he saw
The ills that unborn innocents must bear,
When doomed to come to earth--
Bethought--and gave thee birth
To charm the poison from affliction there;
And from his source eternal, bade thee draw.

He gave thee power, inferior to his own
But in control o'er matter. 'Mid the crash
Of earthquake, war, and storm,
Is seen thy radiant form
Thou com'st at midnight on the lightning's flash,
And ope'st to those thou lov'st new scenes and worlds unknown.

And still, as wild barbarians fiercely break
The graceful column and the marble dome--
Where arts too long have lain
Debased at pleasure's fain,
And bleeding justice called on wrath to come,
'Mid ruins heaped around, thou bidst thy votarists wake.

Methinks I see thee on the broken shrine
Of some fall'n temple--where the grass waves high
With many a flowret wild;
While some lone, pensive, child
Looks on the sculpture with a wondering eye
Whose kindling fires betray that he is chosen thine. [FN#1]

[FN#1] Genius, perhaps, has often, nay generally, been awakened and
the whole future bent of the mind thus strongly operated upon,
determined