The Father's parting prayer is said, The daughter's parting kiss is given; The tears a happy bride may shed, Like dews ascend to heaven; And leave the earth from which they rise, But balmier airs, and rosier dyes. VII. THE HERMIT. Years fly; beneath the yew-tree shade Thy father's holy dust is laid; The brook glides on, the jasmine blows; But where art thou, the wandering wife, And what the bliss, and what the woes, Glass'd in the mirror-sleep of life? For whether life may laugh or weep, Death the true waking--life the sleep. None know! afar, unheard, unseen-- The present heeds not what has been; This herded world together press'd, Can miss no straggler from the rest-- Not so! Nay, all _one_ heart may find, Where Memory lives, a saint enshrined-- Some altar-hearth, in which our shade The Household-god of Thought is made, And each slight relic hoarded yet With faith more solemn than regret. Who tenants thy forsaken cot-- Who tends thy childhood's favourite flowers-- Who wakes, from every haunted spot, The Ghosts of buried Hours? 'Tis He whose sense was doom'd to borrow From thee the Vision and the Sorrow-- To whom the Reason's golden ray, In storms that rent the heart was given; The peal that burst the clouds away Left clear the face of heaven! And wealth was his, and gentle birth, A form in fair proportions cast; But lonely still he walk'd the earth-- The Hermit of the Past. It was not love--that dream was o'er! No stormy grief, no wild emotion; For oft, what once was love of yore, The memory soothes into devotion! He bought the cot:--The garden flowers-- The haunts his Eva's steps had trod, Books--thought--beguiled the lonely hours, That flow'd in peaceful waves to God. VIII. DESERTION. She sits, a Statue of Despair, In that far land, by that bright sea; She sits, a Statue of Despair, Whose smile an Angel seem'd to be-- An angel that could never die, Its home the heaven of that blue eye! The smile is gone for ever there-- She sits, the Statue of Despair! She knows it all--the hideous tale-- The wrong, the perjury, and the shame;-- Before the bride had left her vale, Another bore the nuptial name; Another lives to claim the hand Whose clasp, in thrilling, had defiled: Another lives, O God, to brand The Bastard's curse upon her child! ANOTHER!--through all space she saw The face that mock'd th' unwedded mother's! In every voice she heard the Law, That cried, "Thou hast usurp'd another's!" And who the horror first had told?-- From _his_ false lips in scorn it came-- "Thy charms grow dim, my love grows cold; My sails are spread--Farewell." Rigid in voiceless marble there-- Come, sculptor, come--behold Despair!