I have sung my last song, and am ready
To go at the dying of day;
Ere the gloom of night comes to sadden,
My feet shall have passed away.
No more when you meet at the twilight
Shall I mingle my voice with the strains
That tell of home, of love, and heaven,
And the past with its pleasures and pains.
And when again you are carolling
The old songs I love so well,
Will you steal a thought for the absent,
For the one who is saying farewell?
Or must I then, too, be forgotten
When my voice shall be nevermore heard?
Will regret ne’er trouble thy bosom,
Nor memory ever be stirred?
Sing on, happy hearts, in the gloaming;
Sing of home, and of heaven, and love;
Heed not the feet that have wandered
Far away, like the voice of a dove.
An echo I hear sweetly tender,
That seems ever to whisper to me
Of a meeting of friends long severed,
In a life made all perfect and free.
THE FIRST SNOW.
I’m walking to-day with mem’ry
Through the woodlands weird and still,
With ghostly shadows around me,
Haunting, and strange, and chill.
Ominous clouds are gathering
O’er a ghastly, threatening sky;
The voice of the wind is grieving
In the treetops bare and high.
And the streams are stilled and sleeping,
And under my onward tread
The fallen leaves are rustling;
And from the pale, silent dead
Come stealing back phantom footsteps
By many a ruined bower;
And tender, mystical murmurings,
From many a pale dead flower;
And a subtle song of summer,
Of beautiful seasons fled,
Of faces, voices, and ruined hopes,
Sweet dreams, and the tears we shed;
And sweet as the angels’ singing,
Or the summer’s soft twilight,
Or love asleep in fragrant bloom,
Or the peaceful, dreamland night;
And a love that waked to never die,
A radiant and fadeless bloom
That waning years cannot efface,
An endless and golden noon.
I revel at will with mem’ry
By streams and rippling rills;
My heart is wrapt in ecstasy,
As I climb its shining hills.
But list to the dirge of the wind
Through the ever deep’ning gloom;
See! ’tis falling, the death-white snow,
Awak’ning my soul too soon.
It whitens the lonely moorlands,
And the forest glade and glen,
The dreamy hills and silent vales
Where the summer late hath been.