How Arden loved his child!--how spoke that love Of those dead worlds the light herb waves above; Layer upon layer--those strata of the past, Those gone creations buried in the last! Their bloom, their life, their glory past away, Speak in this relic of a vanish'd day. There, in that guileless face, revived anew The visions glistening through life's morning dew, Fair Hope, pure Honour, undefiled Truth-- The young shape stood before him as his youth![T] And in this love his chastisement was found-- The thorns he had planted, here enclosed him round; He, whom to see had been to love,--in vain Here loved; that heart no answer gave again-- It lived upon the past,--it dwelt afar, This new-found bond from what it loved the bar. Her conscience chid, yet, while it chid, her thought Still the cold past, to freeze the present, brought; How love the sire round whom such shadows throng, The mother's death-bed and the lover's wrong? The dazzling gifts, which had through life beguiled All other souls, are powerless with his child. Vain the melodious tongue, and vain the mind, Sparkling and free as wavelets in the wind; The roseate wreath the handmaid Graces twine Round sternest hearts,--soft infant, breaks on thine; Child, candid, simple, frank, to her allied, Far more, the nature sever'd from her side, With its fresh instincts and wild verdure, fann'd By fragrant winds, from haunted Fable-land; Than all the garden graces which betray By the bough's riches the worn tree's decay. What charms the ear of Childhood?--not the page Of that romance which wins the sober sage; Not the dark truths, like warning ghosts, which pass Along the pilgrim path of _Rasselas_; Not wit's wrought crystal which, so coldly clear, Reflects, in _Zadig_, learning's icy sneer; Unreasoning, wondering, stronger far the thrall Of Aimee's cave,[U] or young Aladdin's hall; And so the childhood of the heart will find } Charms in the poem of a child-like mind, } To which the vision of the world is blind! } Ev'n as the savage, 'midst the desert's gloom, Sees, hid from us, the golden fruitage bloom, And, where the arid silence wraps us all, Lists the soft lapse of the glad waterfall!