For the Southern Literary Messenger.
TRUE CONSOLATION.
| He had wept o'er the honored, in age who die; O'er the loved,—in beauty's bloom; O'er the blighted buds of infancy: Till all earth was to him a Tomb. And sorrow had drunk his youthful blood, And hastened the work of Time; And the cankering tooth of ingratitude Had withered his manhood's prime. But he turned from earth, and he looked to the sky, His sorrow by faith beguiling; Where Mercy sits enthroned on high, With his loved ones round her smiling. He looked to Eternity's bright shore, From the wreck of perished years; And Mercy's voice, through the storm's wild roar, Came down to sooth his fears. That gentle voice has charmed away The frenzy from his brain; And his withered heart, in her eye's mild ray, May bud and bloom again; And her smile has chased the gloom from his brow, So late by clouds o'ercast; And his cheek is bright with the sun-set glow, That tells that the Storm is past. And his heart returns to the world again, But forgets not the world above; For Heaven sends love to sooth earthly pain, But Heaven's whole bliss is Love. |
For the Southern Literary Messenger.
SONNET.
BY R. H. WILDE, Of Georgia.
| Thou hast thy faults VIRGINIA!—yet I own I love thee still, although no son of thine; For I have climb'd thy mountains, not alone— And made the wonders of thy vallies mine, Finding from morning's dawn 'till day's decline Some marvel yet unmarked—some peak whose throne Was loftier; girt with mist, and crown'd with pine, Some deep and rugged glen with copse o'ergrown, The birth of some sweet valley, or the line Traced by some silver stream that murmured lone; Or the dark cave where hidden crystals shine, Or the wild arch across the blue sky thrown;1 Or else those traits of nature, more divine That in some favored child of thine had shone. |