FADED FLOWERS.

I.

FAREWELL, ye perish'd flowers
That on the cold ground lie;
How gay ye smiled

'Mid the brown wild,

'Neath summer's painted sky;-
Pass'd hath your bloom away;
Your stalks are sere and bent:
On the howling blast
The rain sweeps past,
From the dim firmament.

II.

I think me of your pride,
When Zephyr came with Spring;
Then sigh to know

What wreck and woe

A few brief months may bring!
Emblems of human fate,

Ye say "Though bright and fair
Life's morning be,

Its eve may see

The clouds of grief and care!

1

In

III.

you I scan the fate

Life's sunniest hopes have met,
When Youth's bright noon,
(Alas! how soon!)

In manhood's twilight set-
Yes! joy by joy decay'd

As ye did fade, sweet blooms,
Leaving behind,

Upon the wind,

Awhile your soft perfumes.

IV.

As waned each blossom bright,

So doom'd were to depart

Friend after friend

And each to rend

A fibre from the heart:

Green Spring again shall bid

Your boughs with bloom be crown'd; But alas! to Man,

In earth's brief span,

No second spring comes round!

V.

Yes! friends who clomb Life's hill

Together, long ago,

Are parted, and

Their fatherland

No more their places know!

G

We see them not, nor hear them,
Among the garden bowers;
They have pass'd away
In bright decay,

Like you, ye perish'd flowers!

THE NIGHT HAWK.

Vox, et præterea nihil.

I.

THE winds are pillow'd on the waveless deep,
And from the curtain'd sky the midnight moon
Looks sombred o'er the forest depths, that sleep
Unstirring, while a soft melodious tune,
Nature's own voice, the lapsing stream, is heard,
And ever and anon th' unseen, night-wandering bird.

I I.

An Arab of the air, it floats along,

Enamour'd of the silence and the night, The tall pine-tops, the mountains dim among, Aye wheeling on in solitary flight;

Like an ungentle spirit earthwards sent,

To haunt the pale-faced moon, a cheerless banishment.

III.

A lone, low sound-a melancholy cry,
Now near, remoter now, and more remote;
In the blue dusk, unseen, it journeys by,

Loving amid the starlight-calm to float;

Now sharp and shrill, now faint; and by degrees Fainter, like summer winds that die 'mid leafy trees.

IV.

Listening, in the blue solitude I stand

The breathless hush of midnight-all is still; Unmoved the valleys spread, the woods expand; There is a slumbering mist upon the hill ; Nature through all her regions seems asleep, Save, ever and anon, that sound so wild and deep.

V.

Moonlight and midnight! all so vast and void,
Life seems a vision of the shadowy past,
By mighty silence swallow'd and destroy'd,

And Thou of living things the dirge and last :
Such quietude enwraps the moveless scene,
As if, all discord o'er, Mankind had never been.