As blessed hours roll on, that never may return.
What have they seen, those changed and vanish’d years?
Uplifted, soaring thoughts, all quelled by fate;
Affection, mournful in its gushing tears;
And midst the crowd that at the funeral wait,
A widowed mother’s heart made desolate
O’er a war-honor’d Sire’s low place of rest;
These are the tales that Memory may relate:
They have a moral for the aspiring breast,
A lesson of Decay on earthliness impress’d.