the joys its memories could not keep,
Save by the sympathy which shares their doom.

Thus Ruin stands
For Ruin--and the wreck of favorite things,
To him who o'er the waste but wrings his hands,
Proofs of the _fall_, and not the spring-time brings.

Ah! who will weep,
In after seasons, when thou too art gone,
Within this grot, where shadowy memories keep
Their watch above the realm they keep alone?

Who will lament,
In fruitless tears, that she the dear one died,
And thy surviving heart, in languishment,
Soon sought the grave and withered at her side?

A newer bright
Makes young the woods--and bowers that not to thee
Brought fruit or blossom, triumph in the sight
Of those who naught but fruit and blossom see;

To whom no voice
Whispers, that through the loved one's would the root
Of that exulting shrub, with happiest choice,
Has gone, with none its passage to dispute.

While thine own heart,
In neighboring hillock, conscious, it may be--
Quivers to see the fibres rend and part
The fair white breast which was so dear to thee.

Of all the past,
That precious history of thy love and youth,
When not a cloud thy happy dawn o'ercast,
When all thou felt'st was joy, thou saw'st was truth;

These have no speech
For idiot seasons that still come and go--
To whom the heart no offices can teach,
Vainer than breezes that at midnight blow!

And yet there seem
Memorials still in nature, which are taught,--
Unless all pleasant fancies be a dream,
To bring our sweetest histories back to thought.

A famous tree
Was this, three hundred years ago, when stood
The hunter-chief below it, bold and free,
Proud in his painted pomp and deeds of blood.

By hunger taught,
He gathered the brown acorn in its shade,
And ere he slept, still gazing upward, caught
Sweet glimpses of the night, in stars arrayed.

His hatchet sunk
With sharp wound, fixing his own favorite sign,
Deep in the living column of its trunk,
Where thou may'st read a history such as thine.

He, too, could feel
Such passion as awakes the noble soul--
And in fond hour, percha