O the sacred Night, when memory comes
With an aspect mild and sweet to me,
But her tones are sad as a ballad air
In childhood heard on a nurse's knee;
And round her throng fair forms long fled,
With brows of snow and hair of gold,
And eyes with the light of summer skies,
And lips that speak of the days of old.
Wide is your flight,
O spirits of Night,
By strath, and stream, and grove,
But most in the gloom
Of the Poet's room
Ye choose, fair ones, to rove.
Richard Rowe.
Superstites Rosae
The grass is green upon her grave,
The west wind whispers low;
"The corn is changed, come forth, come forth,
Ere all the blossoms go!"
In vain. Her laughing eyes are sealed,
And cold her sunny brow;
Last year she smiled upon the flowers —
They smile above her now!
Soul Ferry
High and dry upon the shingle lies the fisher's boat to-night;
From his roof-beam dankly drooping, raying phosphorescent light,
Spectral in its pale-blue splendour, hangs his heap of scaly nets,
And the fisher, lapt in slumber, surge and seine alike forgets.
Hark! there comes a sudden knocking, and the fisher starts from sleep,
As a hollow voice and ghostly bids him once more seek the deep;
Wearily across his shoulder flingeth he the ashen oar,
And upon the beach descending finds a skiff beside the shore.
'Tis not his, but he must enter — rocking on the waters dim,
Awful in their hidden presence, who are they that wait for him?
Who are they that sit so silent, as he pulleth from the land —
Nothing heard save rumbling rowlock, wave soft-breaking on the sand?
Chill adown the tossing channel blows the wailing, wand'ring breeze,
Lonely in the murky midnight, mutt'ring mournful memories, —
Summer lands where once it brooded, wrecks that widows' hearts have wrung —
Swift the dreary boat flies onwards, spray, like rain, around it flung.