Virginia Free Press

The Bride

They brought me to another land,
Across the ocean wide,
I dwell with a stranger, and am his
A young and happy bride.
They called me beautiful and fair,
But yet I know mine eye
Sees not the brightness that it lay
Beneath my own sweet sky:
They wreathed, too, in my auburn hair,
The jewels of their race;
I could but weep to see how ill
They suited with my face.
Alas! upon my altered brow
Their garlands bloom in vain;
My cheeks too pale to know
The tint of joy again.
I tread their fairy halls at night,
And all have smiles for me;
I meet with thrilling looks that make
Me dream of hope and thee.
How beautiful are all things here!
How wonderful and bright!
The very stars appear to shed
A softer, newer light.
But yet I feel my heart would give
Them all for one sweet flower.
Pluck'd from the valleys, where my foot
First trod in childhood's hour;
Where I beheld the ocean flow
So proudly by the shore;
And saw the moonlight stream upon
What I shall see no more.
I loved, upon the dark green rock,
To take my lonely seat;
And watch the heaving billows throw
Their sea-weeds at my feet;
To meet the summer wind and hear
Its murmurs in the trees;
And think thy voice was whispering there
With every passing breeze.
Yet sometimes, in my dreams, I view
High ruins, lone and dark;
And sometimes I am on the sea
Within my own loved bark;
And softly then we glide along,
Beneath the twilight stars.
Once more I see the sky I love,
My own dear home afar.
Once more I twine around my brow
The laurel crown so pale;
Once more I hear my mother's voice
Comes sighing on the gale.
And then there is a wild sweet joy,
That thrills me in my dreams--
Hanging its radiance on my heart,
Like sunset's golden beams.
George W. Hammond