| |
| ROUND Autumn’s mouldering urn | |
| Loud mourns the chill and cheerless gale, | |
| When nightfall shades the quiet vale | |
| And stars in beauty burn. | |
| |
| ’T is the year’s eventide. | 5 |
| The wind, like one that sighs in pain | |
| O’er joys that ne’er will bloom again | |
| Mourns on the far hillside. | |
| |
| And yet my pensive eye | |
| Rests on the faint blue mountain long; | 10 |
| And for the fairy-land of song, | |
| That lies beyond, I sigh. | |
| |
| The moon unveils her brow; | |
| In the mid-sky her urn glows bright, | |
| And in her sad and mellowing light | 15 |
| The valley sleeps below. | |
| |
| Upon the hazel gray | |
| The lyre of Autumn hangs unstrung | |
| And o’er its tremulous chords are flung | |
| The fringes of decay. | 20 |
| |
| I stand deep musing here, | |
| Beneath the dark and motionless beech, | |
| Whilst wandering winds of nightfall reach | |
| My melancholy ear. | |
| |
| The air breathes chill and free: | 25 |
| A spirit in soft music calls | |
| From Autumn’s gray and moss-grown halls, | |
| And round her withered tree. | |
| |
| The hoar and mantled oak, | |
| With moss and twisted ivy brown, | 30 |
| Bends in its lifeless beauty down | |
| Where weeds the fountain choke. | |
| |
| That fountain’s hollow voice | |
| Echoes the sound of precious things; | |
| Of early feeling’s tuneful springs | 35 |
| Choked with our blighted joys. | |
| |
| Leaves, that the night-wind bears | |
| To earth’s cold bosom with a sigh, | |
| Are types of our mortality, | |
| And of our fading years. | 40 |
| |
| The tree that shades the plain, | |
| Wasting and hoar as time decays, | |
| Spring shall renew with cheerful days,— | |
| But not my joys again. | |
| |
