The Rhode Island Republican

POETRY.

THE DEAD HORSEMAN.

Occasioned by reading the manner of carrying young man to burial, on the back of a horse, in the mountainous regions about Vettie's Giel, in Norway, in a road on the precipitous declivity of a mountainous narrow that two persons cannot pass abreast.

Who's riding over the Giel so fast,
'Mid the crags of Utledale?
He heeds not cold, nor storm, nor blast;
Though his cheek is deadly pale.
Fringe of pearl from his eye-lash long,
The wintry frost hath hung,
And his sinewy arm seems bold and strong.
Yet his brow is smooth and young
O'er his marble forehead, in clusters bright,
Is wreath'd his golden hair.
His robe is of linen, long and white,
Though a mantle of fur scarce could hide the blight
Of this keen and frosty air.
God speed thee now, thou horseman bold!
For the tempest awakes in wrath,
And thy stony eye is fixed and cold
As the glass of thine icy path.
Down, down the precipice wild he breaks,
Where the foaming waters roar,
And his way up the cliff of the mountain takes,
Where man never trod before.
No checking hand to the rein he lends,
On frost clad summits seen.
But ever and aye his head he bends,
As they plunge in some dark ravine.
Dost thou bow in thy pray'r to the God who guides
Thy course o'er such pavement frail?
Or nod in thy dream o'er the steep where glides
The slippery brook, with its curling tides,
Thou horseman, so young and pale?
Swift over the face of the frozen stream
Toward Lyster Church he hies-
Where holy spire 'mid the mountains gleams,
Like a star in the troubled skies.
Now stay! thou ghastly traveller, stay!
Here pause, in thy mad career-
Be the guilt of thy bosom as dark as it may,
Thou surely can'st purge it here.
But on, like the winged blast, he wends,
Where the bones of the dead are laid.
For the sigh of a mourning group ascends
From the depth of that cypress shade.
At a pit he stayed, whose narrow brink
'Mid swollen snow was groov'd-
The trembling steed from that chasm did shrink,
But the rider sat unmov'd.
They bare him sad from his lonely seat,
His father bound his head-
And they laid him low in that dark retreat,
And breath'd, in accents simply sweet,
The dirge for the youthful dead.
With pride, in a life of toil severe,
His hardy breast had glow'd.
And it scorn'd, in the ense of the slothful bier.
To pace to its last abode.
But his own lov'd steed, which his hands had drest
In the mirth of his boyhood's day,
By the load of his lifeless limbs was prest,
As he sped to his home of clay.
Yet oft to the depths of yon rock barr'd dell,
Where no ray from heav'n hath glow'd;
Where the shadowing rush of the Markless fell,
The trembling child shall point and tell,
How the fearful horseman rode.