My opening numbers told of strength's decline;

My last have painted life a vale of tears:—

Let me not mournfully my task resign,

Like one whose dark existence nought endears;

Without are fightings, and within are fears!

Be such awhile forgot; I turn to thee,

And to the promise of thy early years,

As to the unfolding floweret flies the bee,

Or as I gaze in Spring on some young blooming tree.

The gnarled oak, with ivy overgrown,

Scath’d, blighted, blasted, when it meets the view

May well call forth thought's moralizing tone,

Awakening meditations— sad, yet true:—

But objects may be found of brighter hue,

To which it is delightful still to turn;

Heaven's cloudiest arch, at times, has spots of blue,

Flowers bud and blossom round the funeral urn,

And gleams of sunshine break o’er Winter's landscape stern.

Such hast thou been unto my spirit's eye,—

A ray of sunshine on life's wintry scene,

“A spot of azure in a cloudy sky;”

A wreath of ivy, with its glossy green,

Dark, wither’d leaves and mossy boughs between:

A star in night's dim arch with brightness glowing,

A blooming lowly flower of modest mien

In unsunn’d depth of glade untrodden growing,

A solitary spring, in some bleak desert flowing.

These things derive their magic loveliness

From contrast, and in darkness brighter shine,

And such, amid the ceaseless throng and press

Of ills which make the heart of manhood pine,

The charm of guileless innocence like thine;

Care-fretted hearts confess its soothing spell,

The toil-worn spirits own its power benign,

Feeling and thought ope memory's hidden cell,

And near life's fountain-head we briefly seem to dwell.

There is a holy, blest companionship

In the sweet intercourse thus held with those

Whose tear and smile are guileless; from whose lip

The simple dictate of the heart yet flows;—

Though even in the yet unfolded rose

The worm may lurk, and sin blight blooming youth,

The light born with us long so brightly glows,

That childhood's first deceits seem almost truth,