THE GREEK BOY

Thine ears have drunk the woodland strains

Heard by old poets, and thy veins
Swell with the blood of demigods,
That slumber in thy country's sods.

Now is thy nation free-though late-
Thy elder brethren broke—

Broke, ere thy spirit felt its weight,
The intolerable yoke.

And Greece, decayed, dethroned, doth see
Her youth renewed in such as thee;
A shoot of that old vine that made

The nations silent in its shade.

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"UPON THE MOUNTAIN'S DISTANT HEAD."

UPON the mountain's distant head,

With trackless snows forever white,
Where all is still, and cold, and dead,
Late shines the day's departing light.

But far below those icy rocks,

The vales, in summer bloom arrayed,
Woods full of birds, and fields of flocks,

Are dim with mist and dark with shade.

'Tis thus, from warm and kindly hearts
And eyes where generous meanings burn,
Earliest the light of life departs,

But lingers with the cold and stern.

SONNET-WILLIAM TELL.

CHAINS may subdue the feeble spirit, but thee,
TELL, of the iron heart! they could not tame;
For thou wert of the mountains; they proclain
The everlasting creed of liberty.

That creed is written on the untrampled snow,

Thundered by torrents which no power can hold,

Save that of God, when he sends forth his cold, And breathed by winds that through the free heaven blow Thou, while thy prison walls were dark around

Didst meditate the lesson Nature taught,

And to thy brief captivity was brought

A vision of thy Switzerland unbound.

The bitter cup they mingled, strengthened thee
For the great work to set thy country free.

H 3

TO THE RIVER ARVE.

Thou heedest not-thou hastest on;
From steep to steep thy torrent falls,
Till, mingling with the mighty Rhone,

It rests beneath Geneva's walls.

Rush on--but were there one with me
That loved me, I would light my hearth
Here, where with God's own majesty

Are touched the features of the earth.
By these old peaks, white, high, and vast,
Still rising as the tempests beat,

Here would I dwell, and sleep, at last,

Among the blossoms at their feet.

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