Original.
Mary's Dirge.
By Carolus.
"Manibus date lilia plenis."
O THOU, whose awful mandate goes
Throughout a wondering world of woes,
Mysterious, still the same,
In moments such as this, we feel,
When grief is boundless, we must kneel
And bless THY holy name.
Ah, MARY! what avails thee now
Thy radiant eyes, thy classic brow,
And form of queenly mould;
The charms of polished culture's art,
Thy trusting, noble woman's heart,
Now pulseless, senseless, cold?
What now avails it to have stood,
In mind's keen conquest of the good,
Peerless among thy mates?
Or that a widowed mother wound,
Like NIOBE, her arms around
Her last, whom death awaits?
Alas! when heaven such gifts bestows,
It would, to earth-stained souls, disclose
A gleam of its own light,
But ere we learn how dear the prize,
All fades before our longing eyes,
Save sorrow, dreams, and night.
But where can friends so stricken find
A solace for the anguished mind,
Except in Him who sends
The grief that clouds, the joy that cheers,
The course of checkered, fleeting years.
And whilst he smites befriends?
As now I stand beside thy form,
So late in youth and beauty warm,
And sad, hushed vigil keep,
The eye would be as rayless grown,
As tearless, MARY, as thine own,
Could see—and could not weep.
Behold that lovely ruined shrine,
That marble waste where thought divine
Still seems to sit enthroned;
Those pallid lips whose every word,
Like sweet aëolian music heard,
A hymn to nature toned.
In pity, strew the virgin flower,
By virgin hands, in tender shower
Upon her virgin breast;
There sleeps she, purity's picked rose—
An angel snatched from earthly woes
To calm, eternal rest.
Though death's resistless, ruthless might
Sweeps beauty's loveliest forms from sight,
The soul retains her love,
And MARY'S spirit, ever near
The friends her young life cherished here,
Will lead their thoughts above.
Pittsburg, Jan. 21, 1867.
Abridged from the Dublin University Magazine.
Sir Thomas More.
Sir Thomas More did not account his own death an evil; not only, in his last moments, did he mention the king with sweet loyalty, but he also displayed a cheerfulness which has scandalized some writers. Holinshed, for instance, charges him with having been "a jester and scoffer at the houre of his death." This mirthful disposition of More's has made his character an interesting subject of inquiry. But irreverence has nothing in common with that genial tendency which Southey has called pantagruelism, and the desirability of which he has advocated. For pantagruelism is not buffoonery, levity, cynical insensibility; neither does it consist in mere play of wit, intellectual tumbling, and playful freaks of fancy. Jests are but its effects, the ripples, fitfully reflecting the sunlight on the surface, and showing that the underlying mass is a running stream and not a stagnant fen. Music and prayer are sisters; cheerfulness is the music of life, and harmonizes human passions into rest; it is most consistent with that holy creed, the apostle of which taught men to "rejoice evermore;" it is an ascensional force, a verbum, as the old mystics would have said, which carries the spirit upward, and turns human nature toward the bright side of things. He who was the teacher of its outwardly most grotesque aspect has by implication defined pantagruelism as a "marvellous contempt and holding cheap of fortuitous things," (Introd. to Gargantua;) its basis is a want of love for the things that are in the world; its effect is, therefore, a sweet smile at the contrast, perpetual in this earthly life, between aspirations and realities. Hence More's pleasantry, always harmless and free from sarcasm—sparks issuing from a healthy and beautiful spirit. Pantagruelism itself becomes linked, in some natures, to a gentle melancholy, the sadness of the soul exiled from its eternal birthplace; in northern minds especially is this solemnity of reverie frequent; More, to whom religion was a daily food, evinced this dreamy pensiveness, side by side with his mirth, from his youth to his death. It also seemed as if, gifted with the sagacity of a Machiavel, but without craft, he had in the most prosperous moments of his life a power of intuition which could divine his fate, and thus cast a softening radiance over what to other men would have appeared a most dazzling brightness of worldly success. Hence there is in the expression of his features a sort of anxiety mixed with cheerfulness; the penetrative and humorous nose is like that of Erasmus; but the bony, caustic traits of the humorist have otherwise an expression very different from the melancholy which tempers More's face, the open gray eyes, that seem anxiously anticipating the future or contemplating religious things, the lips that half project in that pouting way to be noticed on many Saxon types of countenances.
When Henry VIII. ascended the throne, More ventured to express, in a poem which attracted the royal favor, a conceit which was at once a criticism of the past reign, a hope, and a foreboding for the future: