I feel myself immortal, when on thee
I muse, I shrink to nothingness, and bow
Myself before thee, dread Eternity,
With God coeval, coexisting, still to be.

I go with thee till time shall be no more,
I stand with thee on Time's remotest age,
Ten thousand years, ten thousand times told o'er;
Still, still with thee my onward course I urge;
And now no longer hear the surge
Of Time's light billows breaking on the shore
Of distant earth; no more the solemn dirge--
Requiem of worlds, when such are numbered o'er--
Steals by: still thou art on forever more.

From that dim distance I turn to gaze
With fondly searching glance, upon the spot
Of brief existence, when I met the blaze
Of morning, bursting on my humble cot,
And gladness whispered of my happy lot;
And now 't is dwindled to a point--a speck--
And now 't is nothing, and my eye may not
Longer distinguish it amid the wreck
Of worlds in ruins, crushed at the Almighty's beck.

Time--what is time to thee? a passing thought
To twice ten thousand ages--a faint spark
To twice ten thousand suns; a fibre wrought
Into the web of infinite--a cork
Balanced against a world: we hardly mark
Its being--even its name hath ceased to be;
Thy wave hath swept it from us, thy dark
Mantle of years, in dim obscurity
Hath shrouded it around: Time--what is Time to thee!

In 1832 a living ichneumon was brought to Haverhill, and was on
exhibition at Frinksborough, a section of Haverhill now known as "the
borough," on the bank of the river above the railroad bridge. Three
young ladies of Haverhill went to see it, escorted by Mr. Whittier.
They found that the animal had succumbed to the New England climate,
and had just been buried. One of the ladies, Harriet Minot, afterward
Mrs. Pitman, a life-long friend of the poet, suggested that he should
write an elegy, and these are the lines he produced:--

THE DEAD ICHNEUMON

Stranger! they have made thy grave
By the darkly flowing river;
But the washing of its wave
Shall disturb thee never!
Nor its autumn tides which run
Turbid to the rising sun,
Nor the harsh and hollow thunder,
When its fetters burst asunder,
And its winter ice is sweeping,
Downward to the ocean's keeping.

Sleeper! thou canst rest as calm
As beside thine own da