SONG OF THE SPIRIT OF MORN.

    Now on their couch of rest
      Mortals are sleeping,
    While in dark, dewy vest,
      Flowerets are weeping. 
    Ere the last star of night
      Fades in the fountain,
    My finger of rosy light
      Touches the mountain.

    Far on his filmy wing
      Twilight is wending,
    Shadows encompassing,
      Terrors attending: 
    While my foot’s fiery print,
      Up my path showing,
    Gleams with celestial tint. 
      Brilliantly glowing,

    Now from my pinions fair
      Freshness is streaming,
    And from my yellow hair
      Glories are gleaming. 
    Nature with pure delight
      Hails my returning,
    And Sol, from his chamber bright,
      Crowns the young morning.

My uncle John returned to Switzerland, and I never saw him again; he had made over his share of Covent Garden to my father, and went back to live and die in peace at his Beau Site on the Lake of Geneva.

The first time that I visited Lausanne I went to his grave, and found it in the old burial-ground above the town, where I wonder the dead have patience to lie still, for the glorious beauty of the view their resting-place commands.  It was one among a row of graves with broad, flat tombstones bearing English names, and surrounded with iron railings, and flowers more or less running wild.

My father received the property my uncle transferred to him with cheerful courage, and not without sanguine hopes of retrieving its fortunes:  instead of which, it destroyed his and those of his family; who, had he and they been untrammelled by the fatal obligation of working for a hopelessly ruined concern, might have turned their labors to far better personal account.  Of the eighty thousand pounds which my uncle sank in building Covent Garden, and all the years of toil my father and myself and my sister sank in endeavoring to sustain it, nothing remained to us at my father’s death; not even the ownership of the only thing I ever valued the property for,—­the private box which belonged to us, the yearly rent of which was valued at three hundred pounds, and the possession of which procured us for several years many evenings of much enjoyment.

The only other recollection I have connected with Gerard Street is that of certain passages from “Paradise Lost,” read to me by my father, the sonorous melody of which so enchanted me, that for many years of my life Milton was to me incomparably the first of English poets; though at this time of my earliest acquaintance with him, Walter Scott had precedence over him, and was undoubtedly in my opinion greatest of mortal and immortal bards.  His “Marmion” and “Lay of the Last Minstrel” were already familiar to me.  Of Shakespeare at this time, and for many subsequent years, I knew not a single line.

While our lodging in town was principally inhabited by my father and resorted to by my mother as a convenience, my aunt Dall, and we children, had our home at my mother’s rus in urbe, Craven Hill, where we remained until I went again to school in France.