Till, drop by drop, life’s current ebb’d away;
Till rock and turf grew deeply, darkly red,
And the pale moon gleam’d paler on the dead.
Have such things been, and here?—where stillness dwells
Midst the rude barrows and the moorland swells,
Thus undisturb’d? Oh! long the gulf of time
Hath closed in darkness o’er those days of crime,
And earth no vestige of their path retains,
Save such as these, which strew her loneliest plains
With records of man’s conflicts and his doom,