December 31.
To December.
The passing year, all grey with hours,
Ends, dull month, with thee;
Chilled his summer, dead his flowers,
Soon will his funeral be;
Frost shall drink up his latest breath,
And tempests rock him into death.
How he shivers! from his age
All his leaves have faded,
And his weary pilgrimage
Ends at last unaided
By his own sun that dims its ray,
To leave him dark in his decay.
Hark! through the air the wild storm bears
In hollow sounds his doom,
While scarce a star its pale course steers
Athwart the sullen gloom;
And Nature leaves him to his fate,
To his grey hairs a cold ingrate.
She goes to hail the coming year,
Whose spring-flowers soon shall rise—
Fool, thus to shun an old friend’s bier,
Nor wisely moralize
On her own brow, where age is stealing
Many a scar of time revealing:—
Quench’d volcanoes, rifted mountains,
Oceans driven from land,
Isles submerged, and dried up fountains,
Empires whelm’d in sand—
What though her doom be yet untold—
Nature, like Time, is waxing old!
New Monthly Magazine.