Night is the time to weep; To wet with unseen tears Those graves of memory where sleep The joys of other years; Hopes that were angels in their birth, But perished young, like things on earth! Night is the time to watch; On ocean's dark expanse, To hail the pleiades, or catch The full moon's earliest glance, That brings into the home-sick mind All we have loved, and left behind. Night is the time for care; Like Brutus midst his slumbering host, Night is the time to muse; Then from the eye the soul Takes flight, and with expanding views Beyond the starry pole, Descries athwart the abyss of night, Night is the time to pray ; Steal from the throng to haunts untrod, Night is the time for death; Calmly to yield the weary breath, From sin and suffering cease: Think of heaven's bliss, and give the sign MORTALITY. I. O why should the spirit of mortal be proud? A flash of the lightning, a break of the wave He passes from life to his rest in the grave. 11. The leaves of the oak and the willows shall fade, Be scattered around, and together be laid; And the young, and the old, and the low, and the high, Shall moulder to dust, and together shall lie. III. The child that a mother attended and loved, IV. The maid on whose cheek, on whose brow, in whose eye, And the memory of those that beloved her and praised, Are alike from the minds of the living erased. V. The hand of the king that the sceptre hath borne, The VI. The peasant whose lot was to sow and to reap, The herdsman who climbed with his goats to the steep, The beggar that wandered in search of his bread, Have faded away like the grass that we tread. VII. The saint that enjoyed the communion of heaven, VIII. So the multitude goes-like the flower and the weed So the multitude comes—even those we behold, IX. For we are the same things that our fathers have been, We see the same sights that our fathers have seen, i We drink the same stream, and we feel the same sun, And we run the same course that our fathers have run. X. The thoughts we are thinking our fathers would think, From the death we are shrinking from, they too would shrink; To the life we are clinging to, they too would cling- XI. They loved-but their story we cannot unfold; XII. They died-ay they died! and we things that are now, Who make in their dwellings a transient abode, XIII. Yea, hope and despondence, and pleasure and pain, And the smile and the tear, and the song and the dirge, |