LIKE streamlets to a silent sea,
These songs with varied motion
Flow from bright fancy's uplands free,
To Lethe's clouded ocean;
They lapse in deepening music down
The slopes of flower-lit meadows,
Nor dream, poor songs! how near them frown
Oblivion's rayless shadows!
Yet though of brief and dubious life,
All wed to incompleteness,--
The voices of these lays are rife
With frail and fleeting sweetness;
One chord to make more full the strain,
One note I may not smother,
Is echoed in the heart's refrain
Which holds thy name, my mother!
To thee my earliest verse I brought,
All wreathed in loves and roses,
Some glowing boyish fancy, fraught
With tender May-wind closes;
Thou did'st not taunt my fledgling song,
Nor view its flight with scorning:
"The bird," thou saidst, "grown fleet and strong,
Might yet outsoar the morning!"
Ah me! between that hour and this,
Eternities seem flowing;
O'er hapless graves of youth and bliss
Dark cypress boughs are growing;
Our Fate hath dimmed with base alloy
The rich, pure gold of pleasure,
And changed the choral chant of joy
To care's heart-broken measure!
But through it all,--the blight, the pall,
The stress of thunderous weather,
That God who keeps wild chance in thrall
Hath linked our lots together;
So, hand in hand, we sail the gloom,
Faith's mystic plummet casting
To sound the ways which end in bloom
Of Edens everlasting!
I bless thee, Dear, with reverent thought!
Pale face, and tresses hoary,
Whose every silvery thread hath caught
Some hint of heavenly glory;--
To thee, with trust assured, sublime,
Death's angel-call that waitest,
To thee, as once my earliest rhyme,
Lo! now, I bring--my latest!
