The Rhode Island Republican

POETRY.

From the London Literary Chronicle.

LINES
On the death of Lord Byron, in Greece.

He sleeps in the land of his earliest dream,
In the scene of his brightest story:
The language that kindled his patriot flame
Has chanted the dirge of his glory!-
And the sons of the heroes of ancient days,
O'er the grave of their brother are mourning:
For he came to their succor, he came for their praise
Like the might of their fathers returning.
Oh, his was a spirit, great, gloomy, and dread,
Where Hector and Homer were blended;
For the cloud of the grave round his brightness was spread.
When the flash of his thunder descended.
He haunted the patriot's earliest tomb.
And sung like an orphan his sadness:
For vainly he look'd o'er the valleys of gloom,
For the heirs of that freedom and gladness!
He has hallow'd their cause, it has hallowed his name,
Their fame is embalm'd with his glory:
Pen the Turk, while he bleeds on his pages with shame,
Immortality lives in their story.
But Britain must mourn, with a deeper distress,
And silent and lonely her weeping:
For who can reply with a soothing address,
Like the song of the bard that is sleeping?
Oh, then, let the light of his pages be sought,
Let her breathe in his language her sorrow:
She cannot be wrung with an anguishing thought,
But there she its language may borrow.
The course of his spirit was awfully high,
Among the dread regions of thunder;
It flashed through the deep, and it flamed through the sky:
It burst every trammel asunder!
He look'd on the world-it was splendor or gloom.
All midnight or noon, in his mirror:-
He search'd heaven and earth, and he rent every tomb,
For the stories of rapture and terror.
Yet thinks not the soft harp of passion unstrung
In sympathy, sadness, or pleasure:
Like the siren he wept-like the siren he sung.
With a magical sweetness by measure.
The gloom and the tempest would pass from the sphere,
And the landscape bloom lovely and tender;
His genius would beam in the dew of a tear,
Or rise from the ocean in splendor.
But he rests in the chilly embraces of death,
And his soul to its home is taken;
The angel has hush'd the wild strains of his breath.
And who shall its slumbers awaken!