TO THE ALABASTER SARCOPHAGUS, DEPOSITED IN THE BRITISH MUSEUM. BY HORACE SMITH, ESQ. THOU Alabaster relic! while I hold My hand upon thy sculptured margin thrown, Might'st thou relate the changes thou hast known; Launched from the Almighty's hand at the creation. Yes thou wert present when the stars and skies And fixed the blazing sun upon its basis, How many thousand ages from thy birth Thou slept'st in darkness it were vain to ask, What time Elijah to the skies ascended, Thebes, from her hundred portals, filled the plain, What funeral pomps extended in thy train, What banners waved, what mighty music swelled, As armies, priests, and crowds bewailed in chorus, Their King-their God-their Serapis-their Orus! Thus to thy second quarry did they trust Thee, and the lord of all the nations round, Grim king of silence! Monarch of the dust! Embalmed, anointed, jewelled, sceptered, crowned, Here did he lie in state, cold, stiff, and stark, A leathern Pharaoh grinning in the dark. Thus ages rolled; but their dissolving breath The Persian conqueror o'er Egypt poured Then did the fierce Cambyses tear away The ponderous rock that sealed the sacred tomb; Then did the slowly penetrating ray Redeem thee from long centuries of gloom, And lowered torches flashed against thy side, As Asia's king thy blazoned trophies eyed. Plucked from his grave, with sacrilegious taunt, They tore the sceptre from his graspless hand; Some pious Thebans, when the storm was past, Over its entrance a concealing rill; Then thy third darkness came, and thou didst sleep Twenty-three centuries in silence deep. But he from whom nor pyramids nor sphynx From the tomb's mouth unloosed the granite links, Thou art in London, which, when thou wert new, Here, where I hold my hand, 'tis strange to think What other hands, perchance, preceded mine; Others have also stood beside thy brink, And vainly conned the moralizing line! Kings, sages, chiefs, that touched this stone, like me, Where are ye now? Where all must shortly be. All is mutation;—he within this stone Was once the greatest monarch of the hour. TO THE DYING YEAR. THOU desolate and dying year! Since nature smiled upon thy birth, Sad alteration !-Now how lone, How verdureless is nature's breast; Thou desolate and dying year! Yet lovely in thy lifelessness, As beauty stretched upon the bier In death's clay-cold and dark caress; There's loveliness in thy decay, Which breathes, which lingers round thee still, Like memory's mild and cheering ray Beaming upon the night of ill. Yet yet the radiance is not gone Which shed a richness o'er the scene, Which smiled upon the golden dawn Oh! still a melancholy smile Gleams upon nature's aspect fair, To charm the eye a little while, Ere ruin spreads his mantle there! Thou desolate and dying year! Since Time entwined thy vernal wreath, How often love hath shed the tear, And knelt beside the bed of death: How many hearts, that lightly sprung When joy was blooming but to die, Their finest chords by death unstrung, Have yielded life's expiring sigh. And pillowed low beneath the clay, Have ceased to melt-to breathe to burn, The proud, the gentle, and the gay, For all that were our blessings here, The loved the lost-the sainted dead! Thou desolate and dying year! Of deep and stern morality!— Promise of youth! Fair as the form Of heaven's benign and golden bow, And sheds a light on every woe: As if her magic voice were strung With the empyreal fire from heaven; And love, which never can expire, Whose origin is from on high, D |