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.