- WHEN, in the hour of wakeful dreams,
- Our passions sink in pensive mood,
- And voiceless meditation seems
- A priestly heraldry of good,
- The trembling soul, enwrapt in fears,
- Subdues what virtue e'er abhors;
- And, wandering backward through the years,
- Communes with spectre monitors.
- The memory is a dreary track
- Beside a dim and sullen deep;
- And we who sadly saunter back,
- Discourse with shadows, as in sleep:
- Upon that shore of solemn pence,
- These teachers haunt, the paths we tread,
- And earth-born aspirations cease
- While there we group the quick and dead.
- The rainbow showers of childhood's grief,
- And those delights that urged us on,
- Ere blooming hope had cast a loaf,
- Or care had dimmed the lustrous dawn,
- Again steal o'er us, and reveal
- Strange records for mature time;
- And, in these lonely walks, we feel
- Their influence over manhood's prime.
- The scenes whose ways were traveled when
- The heart, untutored yet in guile,
- In faith, observed fair deeds of men,
- And from them sketched the world the while,
- Are peopled there with forms uncouth;
- And there the haggard dreamer stands,
- Where ships, hope-laden in our youth,
- Lie wrecked and rotting on the sands!
- We gaze, and earth's illusions fade;
- Truth's beacon gleams athwart the tide;
- And, in the startling light portrayed,
- Behold the fate of human pride:
- Its scattered fabrics moulder where
- The waves remorseless, ceaseless roll-
- The dark, o'erwhelming waves of care,
- That swallowed up the eager soul.
- And, oh! amid this dread repose,
- What schemes of high renown we greet!
- Alas! the darksome billow strews
- Their towers in mockery at our feet!
- Heart-burning chilled, wild visions past,
- With all the glorious hues they wore;
- In faith exalted, left, at last,
- Sheer wrecks decaying on the shore!
- Nor dreams of folly only – kind,
- Congenial passions, which the soul
- Embraced when first the tender mind
- Was conscious of their mild control –
- Even these upon that tide were launched,
- With silken sail and breeze so fair.
- How soon their brightening hopes were quenched!
- The wave has cast the fragments then:
- Ah! such the relics which appear
- To every retrospective gaze;
- Such relics each returning year
- Along this desert shore displays.
- A thousand glittering marks we view,
- Where life's perspective valleys stretch:
- How lone, how desolate the few
- That greet us When those vales We reach!
- And by this shore of wrecks, we learn
- Deep lessons of mysterious lore;
- Whence, awed and half subdued, we turn
- More fitted for the scenes before:
- And thus the teachers of the past,
- That truthful world in memory's scope,
- Follow the pilgrim to the last,
- To chide regrets or chasten hope.
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