Or a head do I clutch, whose devices were such,
That death must have lent them his sting—
So daring they were, so reckless of fear,
As heaven had wanted a king?
Did the tongue of the lie, while it couch'd like a spy
In the haunt of thy venomous jaws,
Its slander display, as poisons its prey
The devilish snake in the grass?
That member unchain'd, by strong bands is restrain'd,
The inflexible shackles of death;
And, its emblem, the trail of the worm, shall prevail
Where its slaver once harbour'd beneath.
And oh! if thy scorn went down to thine urn
And expired, with impenitent groan;
To repose where thou art is of peace all thy part,
And then to appear—at the Throne!
Like a frog, from the lake that leapeth, to take
To the Judge of thy actions the way,
And to hear from His lips, amid nature's eclipse,
Thy sentence of termless dismay.
* * * * *
The hardness of iron thy bones shall environ,
To brass-links the veins of thy frame
Shall stiffen, and the glow of thy manhood shall grow
Like the anvil that melts not in flame!
But wert thou the mould of a champion bold
For God and his truth and his law?
Oh, then, though the fence of each limb and each sense
Is broken—each gem with a flaw—
Be comforted thou! For rising in air
Thy flight shall the clarion obey;
And the shell of thy dust thou shalt leave to be crush'd,
If they will, by the creatures of prey.
AM BRUADAR.
THE DREAM.
We submit these further illustrations of the moral maxims of "The Skull." In the original they are touched in phraseology scarcely unworthy of the poet's Saxon models.
As lockfasted in slumber's arms
I lay and dream'd (so dreams our race
When every spectral object charms,
To melt, like shadow, in the chase),
A vision came; mine ear confess'd
Its solemn sounds. "Thou man distraught!
Say, owns the wind thy hand's arrest,
Or fills the world thy crave of thought?
* * * * *