For thee her poet’s lyre is wreathed,
Her marble wrought, her music breathed;
For thee she rings the birthday bells;
Of thee her babe’s first lisping tells;
For thine her evening prayer is said
At palace-couch and cottage-bed;
Her soldier, closing with the foe,
Gives for thy sake a deadlier blow,
His plighted maiden, when she fears
For him the joy of her young years,
Thinks of thy fate, and checks her tears;
And she, the mother of thy boys,
Though in her eye and faded cheek
Is read the grief she will not speak,
The memory of her buried joys,
And even she who gave thee birth,
Will, by their pilgrim-circled hearth,
Talk of thy doom without a sigh;
For thou art Freedom’s now, and Fame’s:
One of the few, the immortal names,
That were not born to die.
FITZ-GREENE HALLECK.
THE DEATH OF NAPOLEON.
“The Death of Napoleon,” by Isaac McClellan (1806-99), was yet another of the good old reader songs taught us by a teacher of good taste. We love those teachers more the older we grow.
Wild was the night, yet a
wilder night
Hung round the
soldier’s pillow;
In his bosom there waged a
fiercer fight
Than the fight
on the wrathful billow.
A few fond mourners were kneeling
by,
The few that his
stern heart cherished;
They knew, by his glazed and
unearthly eye,
That life had
nearly perished.
They knew by his awful and
kingly look,
By the order hastily
spoken,
That he dreamed of days when
the nations shook,
And the nations’
hosts were broken.
He dreamed that the Frenchman’s
sword still slew,
And triumphed
the Frenchman’s eagle,
And the struggling Austrian
fled anew,
Like the hare
before the beagle.
The bearded Russian he scourged
again,
The Prussian’s
camp was routed,
And again on the hills of
haughty Spain
His mighty armies
shouted.
Over Egypt’s sands,
over Alpine snows,
At the pyramids,
at the mountain,
Where the wave of the lordly
Danube flows,
And by the Italian
fountain,
On the snowy cliffs where
mountain streams
Dash by the Switzer’s
dwelling,
He led again, in his dying
dreams,
His hosts, the
proud earth quelling.
Again Marengo’s field
was won,
And Jena’s
bloody battle;
Again the world was overrun,
Made pale at his
cannon’s rattle.
He died at the close of that
darksome day,
A day that shall
live in story;
In the rocky land they placed
his clay,
“And left him
alone with his glory.”
ISAAC MCCLELLAN.
HOW SLEEP THE BRAVE.