Lezayre is the name of a beautiful district in the Isle of Man.
I came to the place where my childhood had dwelt,
To the hearth where in early devotion I knelt—
The fern and the bramble grew wild in the hall,
And the long grass of summer waved green on the wall:
The roof-tree was fallen, the household had fled,
The garden was ruined, the roses were dead,
The wild bird flew scared from her desolate stone,
And I breathed in the home of my boyhood—alone.
That moment is past, but it left on my heart
A remembrance of sadness which will not depart:
I have wandered afar since that sorrowful day,
I have wept with the mournful, and laughed with the gay;
I have lived with the stranger, and drank of the rills
Which go warbling their music on loftier hills;
But I never forgot, in rejoicing or care,
That mouldering hearth, and those hills of Lezayre.
Yet droop not, my spirit! nor hopelessly mourn
Over ills which the best and the wisest have borne:
Though the greetings of love, and the voices of mirth,
May for ever be hushed in the homesteads of earth;
Though the dreams and the dwellings of childhood decay,
And the friends whom we cherish go hasting away,
No young hopes are scattered, no heart-strings are riven,
No partings are known in the households of Heaven.
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GENERAL TREATISE ON GEOGRAPHY: with a Copious Pronouncing and Etymological Index. By A. F. Foster, A.M. Forming one of the Volumes of Chambers's Educational Course.
*** This School Geography has been a considerable time in preparation, and will be found one of the most complete works of the kind.