SONNET.

In the mid garden doth a fountain stand;

From font to font its waters fall alway,

Freshening the leaves by their continual play:—

Such often have I seen in southern land,

While every leaf, as though by light winds fanned,

Has quivered underneath the dazzling spray,

Keeping its greenness all the sultry day,

While others pine aloof, a parchèd band.

And in the mystic garden of the soul

A fountain, nourished from the upper springs,

Sends ever its clear waters up on high,

Which, while a dewy freshness round it flings,

All plants which there acknowledge its control

Show fair and green, else drooping, pale, and dry.

THE ETRURIAN KING.
[See Mrs. Hamilton Gray’s “Visit to the Sepulchres of Etruria.”]

One only eye beheld him in his pride,

The old Etrurian monarch, as he, died;

II.

And as they laid him on his bier of stone,

Shield, spear, and arrows laying at his side;

III.

In golden armour with his crown of gold,

One only eye the kingly warrior spied;

IV.

Nor that eye long—for in the common air

The wondrous pageant might not now abide,

Which had in sealèd sepulchre the wrongs

Of time for thirty centuries defied.

VI.

That eye beheld it melt and disappear,

As down an hour-glass the last sand-drops glide.

VII.

A few short moments,—and a shrunken heap

Of common dust survived, of all that pride:

VIII.

And so that gorgeous vision has remained

For evermore to other eye denied:

IX.

And he who saw must oftentimes believe

That him his waking senses had belied,

Since what if all the pageants of the earth

Melt soon away, and may not long abide,

XI.

Yet when did ever doom so swift before

Even to the glories of the earth betide?