O'er thy pale form, as free and unrepressed
As the rash shower that rocks the storm to rest.

For all this goodly earth contained for me,
Of bright or beautiful, lay withering there:
What were its gayest scenes bereft of thee--
What were its joys in which thou couldst not share?
While memory recalled each spot, where we
Had twined together many a garland fair,
Of hope's own wreathing, and the summer hours
Smiled not on happier, gayer hearts than ours.

Hearts, chilled and silent, as the pensive beam,
Whose shadowy glory resting on the pall,
Casts on the dead a sad portentous gleam,
And serves past hours of rapture to recall,
Till the soul roused herself with one wild scream,
As shuddering nature felt the powerful call,
And I awoke in ecstasy to find
'Twas but a fleeting phantom of the mind!

THE RUIN.

I know a cliff, whose steep and craggy brow
O'erlooks the troubled ocean, and spurns back
The advancing billow from its rugged base;
Yet many a goodly rood of land lies deep
Beneath the wild wave buried, which rolls on
Its course exulting o'er the prostrate towers
Of high cathedral--church--and abbey fair,--
Lifting its loud and everlasting voice
Over the ruins, which its depths enshroud,
As if it called on Time, to render back
The things that were, and give to life again
All that in dark oblivion sleeps below:--
Perched on the summit of that lofty cliff
A time-worn edifice o'erlooks the wave,
"Which greets the fisher's home-returning bark,"
And the young seaman checks his blithesome song
To hail the lonely ruin from the deep.

Majestic in decay, that roofless pile
Survives the wreck of ages, rising still
A mournful beacon o'er the sea of time,
The lonely record of departed years:--
Yes--those who view that ruin feel an awe
Sink in the heart, like those who look on death
For the first time, and hear within the soul
A voice of warning whisper,--"Thus, e'en thus,
All human glories perish--rent from time,
And swallowed up in that unmeasured void,
O'er which oblivion rolls his sable tide."--
Such thoughts as these that moss-grown pile calls forth
To those who gaze upon its shattered walls,
Or, musing, tread its grass-grown aisles, or pause
To contemplate the wide and barren heath,
Spreading in rude magnificence around,
With scarce a tree or shrub to intersect
Its gloomy aspect, save the noble ash
That fronts the ruins, on whose hoary trunk
The hurricanes of years have vainly burst