WYOMING.

F. G. HALLECK.

HOU com 'st in beauty, on my gaze at last,
"On Susquehannah's side, fair Wyoming!"
Image of many a dream, in hours long past,
When life was in its bud and blossoming,
And waters, gushing from the fountain spring
Of pure enthusiast thought, dimmed my young

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,
That beetles high thy lovely valley o'er;

And now, where winds thy river's greenest shore,
Within a bower of sycamores am laid;

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
Even of Campbell's pen hath pictured: he

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
Known like old friends, and greeted from afar:
And there are tales of sad reality,

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,
The bard's creations, molded not of clay,
Hearts to strange bliss and suffering assigned-
Young Gertrude, Albert, Waldegrave—where are they?
We need not ask. The people of to-day
Appear good, honest, quiet men enough,
And hospitable too-for ready pay,--

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,
Her Doric column; and upon his brow

The thin hairs, white with seventy winters' snow,
Look patriarchal. Waldegrave 'twere in vain
To point out here, unless in yon scare-crow,
That stands full uniformed upon the plain,

To frighten flocks of crows and blackbirds from the grain.

For he would look particularly droll

In his "Iberian boot" and "Spanish plume,"
And be the wonder of each Christian soul,
As of the birds that scare-crow and his broom.
But Gertrude, in her loveliness and bloom,
Hath many a model here, for woman's eye,

In court or cottage, wheresoe'er her home,
Hath a heart-spell too holy and too high
To be o'er-praised even by her worshiper-Poesy.

There's one in the next field-of sweet sixteen-
Singing and summoning thoughts of beauty born
In heaven with her jacket of light green,
"Love-darting eyes, and tresses like the morn,"
Without a shoe or stocking,-hoeing corn.
Whether, like Gertrude, she oft wanders there,
With Shakspeare's volume in her bosom borne,
I think is doubtful. Of the poet-player

The maiden knows no more than Cobbett ör Voltaire.

There is a woman, widowed, gray, and old,
Who tells you where the foot of Battle stepped
Upon their day of massacre. She told

Its tale, and pointed to the spot, and wept,
Whereon her father and five brothers slept
Shrouldless, the bright-dreamed slumbers of the brave,
When all the land a funeral mourning kept.

And there, wild laurels, planted on the grave,
By Nature's hand, in air their pale red blossoms wave.

And on the margin of yon orchard hill

Are marks where time-worn battlements have been;
And in the tall grass traces linger still

Of "arrowy frieze and wedged ravelin."
Five hundred of her brave that Valley green
Trod on the morn in soldier-spirit gay;
But twenty lived to tell the noon-day scene--
And where are now the twenty? Pass'd away.
Has Death no triumph-hours, save on the battle day?

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,
The first dark day of nothingness,
The last of danger and distress,

(Before Decay's effacing fingers

Have swept the lines where beauty lingers),
And mark'd the mild angelic air,

The rapture of repose that's there,

The fix'd yet tender traits that streak

The langour of the placid cheek,
And-but for that sad shrouded eye,

That fires not, wins not, weeps not now,
And but for that chill, changeless brow,

Where cold Obstructions's apathy
Appals the gazing mourner's heart,
As if to him it could impart

The doom he dreads, yet dwells upon;
Yes, but for these and these alone,
Some moments, ay, one treacherous hour,
He still might doubt the tyrant's power;
So fair, so calm, so softly seal'd,
The first, last look by death reveal'd!
Such is the aspect of this shore;
'Tis Greece, but living Greece no more!
So coldly sweet, so deadly fair,
We start, for soul is wanting there.
Hers is the loveliness in death,

That parts not quite with parting breath;
But beauty with that fearful bloom,
That hue which haunts it to the tomb,
Expression's last receding ray,

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!