ATHANATOS.

WAY with Death,-away

With all her sluggish sleeps and

chilling damps

Impervious to the day,

Where nature sinks into inanity.

How can the soul desire

Such hateful nothingness to crave,

And yield with joy the vital fire
To moulder in the grave?

Yet mortal life is sad,

Eternal storms molest its sullen sky,

And sorrows ever rife

Drain the sacred fountain dry ;

Away with mortal life.

But hail the calm reality,

The seraph Immortality;

Hail the Heavenly bowers of peace
Where all the storms of passion cease;
Wild Life's dismaying struggle o'er,
The wearied spirit weeps no more,
But wears the eternal smile of joy,
Tasting bliss without alloy.

Welcome, welcome happy bowers,
Where no passing tempest lowers,
But the azure heavens display
The everlasting smile of day,
Where the choral seraph choir
Strike to praise the harmonious lyre,
And the spirit sinks to ease
Lulled by distant symphonies:

O to think of meeting there

The friends whose graves received our tear,

The daughter loved, the wife adored,

To our widowed arms restored,

And all the joys which death did sever
Given to us again for ever.

Who would cling to wretched life,
And hug the poisoned thorn of strife,
Who would not long from earth to fly,
A senseless, sluggish lump to lie,
When the glorious prospect lies
Full before his raptured eyes?

(H. Kirke White.)

STANZAS.

ND thou art dead, as young and fair
As aught of mortal birth;

And form so soft, and charms so rare,

Too soon returned to earth!

Though Earth received them in her bed,
And o'er the spot the crowd may tread
In carelessness or mirth,

There is an eye which could not brook
A moment on that grave to look.

I will not ask where thou liest low,

Nor gaze upon the spot;

'There flowers and weeds at will may grow,

So I behold them not :

It is enough for me to prove

That what I loved, and long must love,

Like common earth can rot;

To me there needs no stone to tell

'Tis nothing that I loved so well.

Yet did I love thee to the last

As fervently as thou,

Who didst not change through all the past,
And canst not alter now.

The love where death has set his seal

No age can chill, nor rival steal,

Nor falsehood disavow;

And, what were worse, thou canst not see

Of wrong, or change, or fault in me.

The better days of life were ours,

The worst can but be mine,

The sun that cheers, the storm that lours,

Shall never more be thine.

The silence of that dreamless sleep

I envy now too much to weep;
Nor need I to repine

That all those charms have passed away,

I might have watched through long decay.

The flower in ripened bloom unmatched, Must fall the earliest prey,

Though by no hand untimely snatched, The leaves must drop away;

And yet it were a greater grief

To watch it withering leaf by leaf,

Than see it plucked to-day,

Since earthly eye but ill can bear

To trace the change to foul from fair.

I know not if I could have borne

To see thy beauties fade;

The night that followed such a morn
Had worn a deeper shade;

Thy day without a cloud hath past,
And thou wert lovely to the last,
Extinguished, not decayed,

As stars that shoot along the sky,
Shine brightest as they fall from high.

As once I wept, if I could weep,
My tears might well be shed
To think I was not near to keep
One vigil o'er thy bed;

To gaze, how fondly, on thy face,
To fold thee in a faint embrace,
Uphold thy drooping head;

And show that love, however vain,
Nor thou nor I can feel again.

Yet how much less it were to gain,
Though thou hast left me free,

The loveliest things that still remain,
Than thus remember thee.

The all of thine that cannot die