Felicia Hemans

“ The warm and living spirit of mankind,
Her influence breathes, and bids the blighted heart,
To life and hope from desolation start!
She with a look dissolves the captive's chain,
Peopling with beauty widow'd homes again;
Around the mother, in her closing years,
Gathering her sons once more, and from the tears
Of the dim past but winning purer light,
To make the present more serenely bright.
Nor rests that influence here. From clime to clime,
In silence gliding with the stream of time,
Still doth it spread, borne onwards, as a breeze
With healing on its wings, o'er isles and seas. ”

“ Wheeling the monarch-victor fast and far;
There are more noble strains than those which swell
The triumphs ruin may suffice to tell!
Ye prophet-bards, who sat in elder days
Beneath the palms of Judah! ye whose lays
With torrent rapture, from their source on high,
Burst in the strength of immortality!
Oh! not alone, those haunted groves among,
Of conquering hosts, of empires crush'd, ye sung,
But of that spirit destined to explore,
With the bright day-spring, every distant shore,
To dry the tear, to bind the broken reed,
To make the home of peace in hearts that bleed ”

“ Thou mightst have rear'd the valiant and the free,
In history's page there is no tale of thee.
Yet hast thou thy memorials. On the wild,
Still rise the cairns, of yore all rudely piled, [1]
But hallow'd by that instinct which reveres
Things fraught with characters of elder years.
And such are these. Long centuries are flown,
Bow'd many a crest, and shatter'd many a throne,
Mingling the urn, the trophy, and the bust,
With what they hide—their shrined and treasured dust.
Men traverse Alps and oceans, to behold
Earth's glorious works fast mingling with her mould ”

“ And merry England's voice floats up from all her vales.
Yet are there sweeter sounds; and thou shalt hear
Such as to Heaven's immortal host are dear.
Oh! if there still be melody on earth
Worthy the sacred bowers where man drew birth,
When angel-steps their paths rejoicing trode,
And the air trembled with the breath of God;
It lives in those soft accents, to the sky [7]
Borne from the lips of stainless infancy,
When holy strains, from life's pure fount which sprung,
Breathed with deep reverence, falter on his tongue. ”

“ And whether the horses, that once were the sun's,
Are of bright yellow brass, or of dark dingy bronze;
For some travellers say one thing, and some say another,
And I can't find out which, they all make such a pother. ”

“ Is a turtle, or ring-dove, or but a wood-pigeon,
Which makes people gulls in the name of Religion!
Pray tell if the forests of famed Vallombrosa
Are cut down or not; for this, too, is a Cosa
About which I'm anxious—as also to know
If the Pandects, so famous long ages ago,
Came back (above all, don't forget this to mention)
To that manuscript library called the Laurentian.
Since I wrote the above, I by chance have found out,
That the horses are bright yellow brass beyond doubt ”

“ Full half of their fame, since your voyage to China,
(I'm astonish'd no shocking disaster befel,)
In that swift-sailing first-rate—a cocoa-nut shell!
I hope, my dear H., that you touch'd at Loo Choo,
That abode of a people so gentle and true,
Who with arms and with money have nothing to do.
How calm must their lives be! ”

“ Shall find their temple in the silent waste.
↑ "In some parts of Dartmoor, the surface is thickly strewed with stones, which in many instances appear to have been collected into piles, on the tops of prominent hillocks, at if in imitation of the natural Tors. The Stone-barrows of Dartmoor resemble the cairns of the Cheviot and Grampian hills, and those in Cornwall."—See Cooke's Topographical Survey of Devonshire. ↑ Flint arrow-heads have occasionally been found upon Dartmoor. ↑
"Vixere fortes ante Agamemnona
Multi ”

“ Nocte, carent quia vate sacro."—Horace.
"They had no poet, and they died."—Pope's Translation.
↑ On the east of Dartmoor are some Druidical remains, one of which is a Cromlech, whose three rough pillars of granite support a ponderous table-stone, and form a kind of large ↑ In some of the Druid festivals, fires were lighted on all the cairns and eminences around, by priests, carrying sacred torches. ”