[7] The islands of Lake Erie are surrounded to a considerable distance by the large pond-lily, whose leaves spread thickly over the surface of the lake, and form a kind of bed for the water-snakes in summer.
IMPROMPTU.
AFTER A VISIT TO MRS. ——, OF MONTREAL.
'Twas but for a moment—and yet in that time
She crowded the impressions of many an hour:
Her eye had a glow, like the sun of her clime,
Which waked every feeling at once into flower.
Oh! could we have borrowed from Time but a day,
To renew such impressions again and again,
The things we should look and imagine and say
Would be worth all the life we had wasted till then.
What we had not the leisure or language to speak,
We should find some more spiritual mode of revealing,
And, between us, should feel just as much in a week
As others would take a millennium in feeling.
WRITTEN
ON PASSING DEADMAN'S ISLAND, IN THE GULF OF ST. LAWRENCE,[1] LATE IN THE EVENING, SEPTEMBER, 1804.
See you, beneath yon cloud so dark,
Fast gliding along a gloomy bark?
Her sails are full,—though the wind is still,
And there blows not a breath her sails to fill!
Say, what doth that vessel of darkness bear?
The silent calm of the grave is there,
Save now and again a death-knell rung,
And the flap of the sails with night-fog hung.