THE LAST PLAGUE OF EGYPT.
THE LAST PLAGUE OF EGYPT.
1.
Deep night o’er thy waters, thou dark-rolling Nile,
And the Hebrew sleeps trembling, his lord with a smile,
For a voice comes in dreams to the children of God:
But the proud have no whisper that Death is abroad!
2.
So, nestled in rocks, when the whirlwind is nigh,
They hear its far coming—the birds of the sky!
While trees it must shiver in leaf and in form,
Are hush as the stillness that heralds the storm.
3.
And the Memphian, at midnight, lay smiling and pleased,
His sin all unshriven, his God unappeas’d,
Till o’er his dark slumbers chill shadows were curl’d,
And the soul of the dreamer was far from the world.
4.
And he lay in the coils of the death-spirit, mute,
With a seal on his lips, like the blast in the fruit:
And he seem’d as when hoar-frost hath stiffen’d the flower;
’Twas the blight of the Lord, ’twas the touch of his power.
5.
But still was the starlight—while, shrouded and hid,
Death brooded o’er palace, and cold pyramid;
No voice on the midnight; no larum of wrath;
No sound of the whirlwind—but only its path.
6.
And a cry was in Egypt, when rose the red morn,
For a thousand pale mothers bewail’d their first born;
And Memnon’s sweet music that greeted the Sun,
Was lost in the moan of a nation undone.
7.
And shriek’d the young wife o’er the child of her pain,
That never should breathe on her bosom again;
And breasts that were warm with their nursling before,
But heaved, in their grief, for the boy that she bore.
8.
And the bride shrunk aghast, like the death-stricken dove,
When she woke in the cold frozen clasp of her love:
And a groan for the noble, the lovely outpour’d,
A wail for the battle they waged with the Lord.
9.
And they seem’d like the willows, that, left on the steep,
Are bent o’er the wreck of the forest to weep,
Or lilies that dripping, and drooping of form,
Shed tears o’er the broken, the spoil of the storm.
10.
Ye join not the wailing, ye dwellers of Zan!
Hath the death-angel spared ye, that smote as he ran?
Oh, the blood-sprinkled lintel hath stayed his proud reign,
And watched at your threshhold the Lamb that was slain.