LXXV.
There is one name on which remembrance lingers,
Not soon shall Time tear it from my quick breast;
There comes a music, touched by fairy fingers,
To draw thy features, floats thy spirit’s unrest;
Thy voice shall be a passport through life’s harms;
I will believe thy fondness mends my slips;
When Death shall clasp me in his haggard arms,
I think that name shall arm my quivering lips:
Young years, that made thee wild, had made thee loving;
Nature had crown’d with Beauty what Wit gave;
Perchance this verse shall prove not quite unmoving,
Calling unto thee, as from out the grave:
Yes, well I know, thou’lt sometimes give one sigh,
To years that come no more, when once gone by.
LXXVI.
There was one more, but, ’tis no matter now,
One who’s forgot, I too will learn that lore;
Nor others rest, but wistfully, I plough
Memory’s hard furrows, pregnant now no more;
For now Love’s turned from my too sullen soul,
He will no longer fling the rainbow veil,
Nor glance his mirror o’er defects, to enroll
Me, midst the captives of his courted jail:
I’ll draw fresh sustenance from the past for joy,
And scorn love’s gyves, his fears, his jealous frowns;
Take up the sweets, and mock the archer boy,
Who fools each votary with delusive crowns:
Yet could I buy his pleasures with his woes,
I’d choose them both, the archer God well knows.
LXXVII.
What pride the season takes in his gay flowers!
How the dead year mourns for his withered leaves!
The lover sadly looks on desolate bowers,
No song re-echoes to the verse he weaves:
These all are sad, but promise gilds their death;
Their notes of woe but swell the spring’s new joy;
But, ’tis more pitiful, when the very breath,
Which was our life, seems but the summer’s toy:
With lifted hands, vain man implores the skies;
Curses the sometime joy, the nurse of woe,
The bliss whose unfelt want erst caused no sighs;
His pilgrimage had, once, less grief, less show:
But no; lost love exalts, in saddening, man,
While heartless plodding but degrades his span.