thus the mother sung;)
The shrew, Experience, has not yet
With envious gesture flung
Aside the enchanted veil which hides
Life's pale and dreary look;
An angel lurks in every stream,
A heaven in every brook.
Laugh on, laugh on, my happy child,
Ere drop the tears of woe
Upon that mirror, scattering all
Those glorious shapes, and show
A fleeting shadow, which thou think'st
An angel, breathing, living--
A shallow pebbly brook which thou
Hast fondly deem'd a heaven.
CHANGE.
Change! change! the mournful story
Of all that 's been before;
The wrecks of perish'd glory
Bestrewing every shore:
The shatter'd tower and palace,
In every vale and glen,
In broken language tell us
Of the fleeting power of men.
Change! change! the plough is sweeping
O'er some scene of household mirth,
The sickle hand is reaping
O'er some ancient rural hearth--
Where the mother and the daughter
In the evenings used to spin,
And where little feet went patter,
Full often out and in.
Change! change! for all things human,
Thrones, powers of amplest wing,
Have their flight, and fall in common
With the meanest mortal thing--
With beauty, love, and passion,
With all of earthly trust,
With life's tiniest wavelet dashing,
Curling, breaking into dust.
Where arose in marble grandeur
The wall'd cities of the past,
The sullen winds now wander
O'er a ruin-mounded waste.
Low lies each lofty column;
The owl in silence wings
O'er floors, where, slow and solemn,
Paced the sandal'd feet of kings.
Still change! Go thou and view it,
All desolately sunk,
The circle of the Druid,
The cloister of the monk;
The abbey boled and squalid,
With its bush-maned, staggering wall;
Ask by whom these were unhallow'd--
Change, change hath done it all.
THE TOMB OF THE BRUCE.
Yon old temple pile, where the moon dimly flashes
O'er gray roof, tall window, sloped buttress, and base,
O'erarches the ashes, the now silent ashes,
Of the noblest, the bravest, of Scotia's race.
How hallow'd yon spot where a hero is lying,
Embalm'd in the holiness worship bedews,
The lamb watching over the sleep of the lion,
Religion enthroned on the tom
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