For the burnish'd disc of the rising sun
Hath opened again the gates of day,
And the world's busy hum hath again begun.
All is o'er. But mem'ry will still awake
In their minds the joys of the moonlit lake;
For O! 'tis the climax of pure delight
When truth, love, and friendship, in one unite.
TO THE CARRON.
Flow on, sweet river, with thy happy song!
Flow on and o'er thy weedy pebbles dance
In the gay hey-day of thy sunimer glee !
True, thou art but a tiny rivulet,
Compared to thy more noble sisterhood,
The Thames, the Severn, and the Forth, of whom
Our native bards have well and sweetly sung ;
Yet would we tune our rugged mountain harp
To sing of thee, all puny as thou art,
Nor seeming worth the tribute of a song ;
For thou art dear unto our memory,
Dear as the source from whence we pleasure drew,
When sport and mischief ruled our early years ;
And as a friend renews acquaintanceship
With one long absent, or with one forgot,
So would we now renew our intercourse,
By all the ties that link us to the past.
Flow on, sweet river, with thy happy song!
As thou hast ever flow'd and ever sung
Since the chaotic mass of land and sea
Was sever'd by the Great Creator's hand ;-
Or when, in later days, the fire-vein'd heart
Of our Terrene glow'd in volcanic heat,
And heaved in earthquakes, till its heavings rent
The mountains into chasms, and the plains
With vales abrupt, in verdure yet unclad ;—
Or when the strangely-freighted ark of God
Reposed upon the crest of Ararat,
And the subsiding waters, sweeping on,
Cleft out thy rugged path among the hills.
Flow on, sweet river, with thy happy song!
Thy wavy ripple, and thy dancing spray
In rainbows bending o'er the craggy fall;
Or like to fire-flies buzzing in the sun.
Sure, thou art like a line of liquid light,
Distinguish'd by thy motion and thy noise,-
The panting ghost of thy more portly self,
When Autumn floods come trooping from the hills,
And brim thy verdant banks from side to side
Then have we seen thee in thy curbless might,
Bearing along upon thy turbid breast
Sheaves yet ungarner'd by the husbandman ;
The fleecy wanderers from the mountain folds;
The sylvan wreck of leaves and rifted boughs,
Blown to thy marges from the wind-swept woods;
And where the woodman laid his levell'd pines
For speedy transit, there thy waters crept,
With theftuous waves, and bore them to the main.
Oh we remember well the raids we made
Among the minnows flashing in the pools,
Or floundering in the shallows to the death;
E'en fresh within our recollection lives
The memory of maternal punishments,
For soaking feet and dripping pinafores,
The sure result of our Waltonian sport;
Nor could our best attempts gloss o'er our fault,
Though 'neath the dog star's influence we sate
In purgatorial penance-heat and fear-
Around the smithy hearth, envelop'd in
A haze of blinding vapour; then at home
Condemn'd for half a day to double tasks;
Tied to the cradle-string; our sentinel,
A fretful brat that sent its piercing squall
Through every room, whene'er we stopped to play;
But, worst of all, our wicked playmates came
With leering eyes a-peeping through the panes,
And chafed us with their tantalizing talk
And many a mute grimace; Oh! Pellico,
Companioned by his lonely prison-flower,
Was ne'er in such a straiten'd plight as we.
Flow on, sweet Carron, with thy happy song!
In all thy glory, all thy scenic pride,
For, with the flight of time, we've learnt to look
With studious mind and all-admiring eye,
Upon that dog-ear'd lesson-book, whereon
Nature hath wrote the history of herself,
In part reveal'd to man, nor aught withheld
Of what 'tis meet for finite man to know :
Then, at the calm and dusky hour of eve,
We leisurely along thy mossy marge
[Pursue our devious way, alone, but oft
Wrapt in the busy hum of barren thought,
Diverted from its profitable use
By the surrounding music of the trees,
In sweet response to thy more vocal strain ;
Till, haply, wakening from our wide-eyed dreams,
We see the Swans and callow cygnets skim
The glassy pond and breast the fleecy clouds,
That cast their reflex to its crystal depths;
And as we turn our wandering steps to home,
We stand beside that sacred spot, wherein
The hallow'd ashes of our fathers rest,
And while the weeping elms bedew their graves,
We hear thee chaunt thy dirges to the dead,
In solemn measures, as thou windest by
The quiet hamlet and its charnel-field ;
Then on we pass and reach the rocky brink
Of that ill-fated spot, the "Witch's Pool,"
Where Superstition held her bloody rites,
And Moloch lit his sacrificial fires,
To purge the realm of that reputed crime
That leagued the powers of hell with helpless crones,
Whose hoary hairs devoted them to die.
Here, still thy waters linger, dark and deep,
And for a space they glide with gentle flow,
Till o'er the jutting rocks they splash and hiss,
With merry laughter undulating on
In dancing wavelets down the shallowy way,
Curving around the intercepting stones,
With finer sweep than ever limner drew
"The line of beauty;" till, within the dam,
Again they linger, but they here divide;
One part pursues the good old beaten way;
The other through the smoother mill-race runs,
Like stubborn heretics departing from
The olden canons of their fathers' faith;
Till, for their schism, broken on the wheel
They turn repentant and again they meet,
And mingling, seaward urge their tuneful way;
Then, at their confluence with the flowing tide,
Like straying children late returning home,
Onward they rush to kiss the pouting lips,
And cast themselves upon the heaving breast
Of the Great Mother Sea.
"Here begins a good new year, b'soothan, b'soothan,
And awa' by London toon."
Rhyme of the young unwashed
Another year Old Gaffer Time hath told
Upon his rosary of fleeting hours;
Another year now followeth in his wake,
With merry step, for youth is yet its own;
Another year-another year-but hush!
This moralizing style suits not the light
And buoyant spirit of this happy time,
When right good fellowship smoothes down the cares,
And lulls to peace the jars of social life.
Hail! Christmas, hail! with all thy fun and fare—
Thy tolerated folly, which afflicts
Alike the young and old, the grave and gay,
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