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THE

POETICAL MELANGE.

THE

POETICAL MELANGE.

THE VOICE OF DEPARTED FRIENDSHIP.

I

HAD a friend who died in early youth!

-And often, in those melancholy dreams,

When my soul travels through the umbrage deep
That shades the silent world of memory,

Methinks I hear his voice! sweet as the breath

Of balmy ground-flowers stealing from some spot
Of sunshine sacred, in a gloomy wood,

To everlasting spring.

In the church-yard

Where now he sleeps-the day before he died,
Silent we sat together on a grave;

Till gently laying his pale hand on mine,

Pale in the moonlight that was coldly sleeping

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On heaving sod and marble monument,—

This was the music of his last farewell!

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Weep not, my brother! though thou seest me led,

By short and easy stages, day by day,

With motion almost imperceptible,

Into the quiet grave: God's will be done.
Even when a boy, in doleful solitude

My soul oft sat within the shadow of death!
And when I looked along the laughing earth,
Up the blue heavens, and through the middle air,
Joyfully ringing with the sky-lark's song,

I wept and thought how sad for one so young
To bid farewell to so much happiness.

But Christ hath called me from this lower world,

Delightful though it be and when I gaze

On the green earth, and all its happy hills,
'Tis with the feelings that a man beholds
A little farm which he is doomed to leave
On an appointed day. Still more and more
He loves it, as that mournful day draws near;
But hath prepared his heart-and is resigned !'

Then lifting up his radiant eyes to heaven,
He said, with fervent voice-'O what were life,
Even in the warm and summer light of joy,
Without those hopes, that like refreshing gales,
At evening from the sea, come o'er the soul

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