“Louis! come! thy love is calling;
Lone I lie in night and gloom,
Whilst the sun and moon beams, falling,
Glance upon my lowly tomb.”
“Emma! dear!” I cried in gladness,
“Take me too beneath the sod;
Leave me not to pine in sadness,
Here on earth’s detested clod.”
“Death should only strike the hoary,
Yet, my Louis, thou shalt die,
When the stars again in glory,
Shine upon the midnight sky.”
Tears bedeck’d her long eyelashes,
While she kiss’d my features wan;
Then, like flame that dies o’er ashes,
All at once the maid was gone.
Therefore, pluck I painted violets,
Which shall strew my lifeless clay,
When, to night, the stars have call’d me
Unto joys that last for aye.
ODE TO A MOUNTAIN-TORRENT.
FROM THE GERMAN OF STOLBERG.
How lovely art thou in thy tresses of foam,
And yet the warm blood in my bosom grows chill,
When yelling thou rollest thee down from thy home,
’Mid the boom of the echoing forest and hill.
The pine-trees are shaken—they yield to thy shocks,
And spread their vast ruin wide over the ground,
The rocks fly before thee—thou seizest the rocks,
And whirl’st them like pebbles contemptuously round.
The sun-beams have cloth’d thee in glorious dyes,
They streak with the tints of the heavenly bow
Those hovering columns of vapour that rise
Forth from the bubbling cauldron below.
But why art thou seeking the ocean’s dark brine?
If grandeur makes happiness, sure it is found,
When forth from the depths of the rock-girdled mine
Thou boundest, and all gives response to thy sound.