THE HERMIT.

Years fly; beneath the yew-tree shade

Thy father's holy dust is laid;

The brook glides on, the jasmine blows;

But where art thou, the wandering wife,

And what the bliss, and what the woes,

Glass'd in the mirror-sleep of life?

For whether life may laugh or weep,

Death the true waking — life the sleep.

None know! afar, unheard, unseen —

The present heeds not what has been;

This herded world together press'd,

Can miss no straggler from the rest —

Not so! Nay, all one heart may find,

Where Memory lives, a saint enshrined —

Some altar-hearth, in which our shade

The Household-god of Thought is made,

And each slight relic hoarded yet

With faith more solemn than regret.

Who tenants thy forsaken cot —

Who tends thy childhood's favourite flowers —

Who wakes, from every haunted spot,

The Ghosts of buried Hours?

‘ Tis He whose sense was doom'd to borrow

From thee the Vision and the Sorrow —

To whom the Reason's golden ray,

In storms that rent the heart was given;

The peal that burst the clouds away

Left clear the face of heaven!

And wealth was his, and gentle birth,

A form in fair proportions cast;

But lonely still he walk'd the earth —

The Hermit of the Past.

It was not love — that dream was o'er!

No stormy grief, no wild emotion;

For oft, what once was love of yore,

The memory soothes into devotion!

He bought the cot:— The garden flowers —

The haunts his Eva's steps had trod,

Books — thought — beguiled the lonely hours,

That flow'd in peaceful waves to God.