thee her babes' first lisping tells,
For thine, her evening prayer is said
At palace couch, and cottage bed;
Her soldier, closing with the foe,
Gives for thy sake a deadlier blow;
His plighted maiden, when she fears
For him, the joy of her young years,
Thinks of thy fate, and checks her tears.
And she, the mother of thy boys,
Though in her eye and faded cheek
Is read the grief she will not speak,
The memory of her buried joys,
And even she who gave thee birth,
Will by their pilgrim-circled hearth,
Talk of thy doom without a sigh:
For thou art Freedom's now, and Fame's,
One of the few, the immortal names,
That were not born to die.
* * * * *
From "Fanny."
=_347._= THE BROKEN MERCHANT.
Fanny! 'twas with her name my song began;
'Tis proper and polite her name should end it;
If in my story of her woes, or plan
Or moral can be traced, 'twas not intended;
And if I've wronged her, I can only tell her
I'm sorry for it--so is my bookseller.
* * * * *
Her father sent to Albany a prayer
For office, told how fortune had abused him,
And modestly requested to be mayor--
The council very civilly refused him;
Because, however much they might desire it,
The "public good," it seems, did not require it.
Some evenings since, he took a lonely stroll
Along Broadway, scene of past joys and evils;
He felt that withering bitterness of soul,
Quaintly denominated the "blue devils;"
And thought of Bonaparte and Belisarius,
Pompey, and Colonel Burr, and Caius Marius.
And envying the loud playfulness and mirth.
Of those who passed him, gay in youth and hope,
He took at Jupiter a shilling's worth
Of gazing, through the showman's telescope;
Sounds as of far-off bells came on his ears,
He fancied 'twas the music of the spheres.
He was mistaken, it was no such thing,
'Twas Yankee Doodle, played by Scudder's band;
He muttered, as he lingered listening,
Something of freedom and our happy land;
Then sketched, as to his home he hurried fast,
This sentimental song--his saddest and his last.
* * * * *
=_John G.C. Brainard, 1796-1828._= (Manual, p. 523.)
From Lines "To the Connecticut River."
=_348._= THE PAST AND THE PRESENT.
From that lone lake, the sweetest of the chain,
That links the moun
|