WYOMING. F. G. HALLECK. HOU com 'st in beauty, on my gaze at last, eyes, As by the poet borne, on unseen wing, I breathed, in fancy, 'neath thy cloudless skies, The Summer's air, and heard her echoed harmonies. I then but dreamed: thou art before me now, In life, a vision of the brain no more. I've stood upon the wooded mountain's brow, And now, where winds thy river's greenest shore, And winds, as soft and sweet as ever bore The fragrance of wild flowers through sun and shade, Are singing in the trees, whose low boughs press my head. power Nature hath made thee lovelier than the WYOMING. Had woven, had he gazed one sunny hour Upon thy smiling vale, its scenery With more of truth, and made each rock and tree In the dark legends of thy border war, With woes of deeper tint than his own Gertrude's are. 34F But where are they, the beings of the mind, With manners, like their roads, a little rough, And hands whose grasp is warm and welcoming, tho' tough. Judge Hallenbach, who keeps the toll-bridge gate, And the town records, is the Albert now Of Wyoming; like him, in church and state, The thin hairs, white with seventy winters' snow, To frighten flocks of crows and blackbirds from the grain. For he would look particularly droll In his "Iberian boot" and "Spanish plume," In court or cottage, wheresoe'er her home, There's one in the next field-of sweet sixteen- The maiden knows no more than Cobbett ör Voltaire. There is a woman, widowed, gray, and old, Its tale, and pointed to the spot, and wept, And there, wild laurels, planted on the grave, And on the margin of yon orchard hill Are marks where time-worn battlements have been; Of "arrowy frieze and wedged ravelin." DEATH'S FIRST DAY. [The following beautiful descriptive lines are the best in Byron's Giaour (Jour, an infidel;-applied by the Turks to disbelievers in Mohammedanism.-Webster.) His note annexed to the succeding passages gives an accurate idea of Byron's prose style: "I trust that few of my readers have ever had an opportunity of witnessing what is here attempted in description; but these whe have will probably retain a painful remembrance of that singular beauty which pervades, with few exceptions, the features of the dead, a few hours, and but for a few hours, after 'the spirit is not there.' It is to be remarked in cases of violent death by gun-shot wounds, the expression is always that of langour, whatever the natural energy of the sufferer's character; but in death from a stab, the countenance preserves its traits of feeling or ferocity. and the mind its bias, to the last."] E who hath bent him o'er the dead Ere the first day of death is fled, (Before Decay's effacing fingers Have swept the lines where beauty lingers), The rapture of repose that's there, The fix'd yet tender traits that streak The langour of the placid cheek, That fires not, wins not, weeps not now, Where cold Obstructions's apathy The doom he dreads, yet dwells upon; That parts not quite with parting breath; A gilded halo hovering round decay, The farewell beam of Feeling passed away! Spark of that flame, perchance of heavenly birth, Which gleams, but warms no more its cherish'd earth! |