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| AMID these mouldering walls, this marble round, | |
| Where slept the heroes of the Julian name, | |
| Say, shall we linger still in thought profound, | |
| And meditate the mournful paths to fame? | |
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| What though no cypress shades, in funeral rows, | 5 |
| No sculptured urns, the last records of fate, | |
| O’er the shrunk terrace wave their baleful boughs, | |
| Or breathe in storied emblems of the great; | |
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| Yet not with heedless eye will we survey | |
| The scene though changed, nor negligently tread; | 10 |
| These variegated walks, however gay, | |
| Were once the silent mansions of the dead. | |
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| In every shrub, in every floweret’s bloom | |
| That paints with different hues yon smiling plain, | |
| Some hero’s ashes issue from the tomb, | 15 |
| And live a vegetative life again. | |
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| For matter dies not, as the sages say, | |
| But shifts to other forms the pliant mass, | |
| When the free spirit quits its cumberous clay, | |
| And sees, beneath, the rolling planets pass. | 20 |
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| Perhaps, my Villiers, for I sing to thee, | |
| Perhaps, unknowing of the bloom it gives, | |
| In yon fair scion of Apollo’s tree | |
| The sacred dust of young Marcellus lives. | |
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| Pluck not the leaf,—’t were sacrilege to wound | 25 |
| The ideal memory of so sweet a shade; | |
| In these sad seats an early grave he found, | |
| And the first rites to gloomy Dis conveyed. | |
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| Witness thou field of Mars, that oft hadst known | |
| His youthful triumphs in the mimic war, | 30 |
| Thou heardst the heartfelt, universal groan | |
| When o’er thy bosom rolled the funeral car. | |
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| Witness, thou Tuscan stream, where oft he glowed | |
| In sportive stragglings with the opposing wave, | |
| Fast by the recent tomb thy waters flowed, | 35 |
| While wept the wife, the virtuous, and the brave. | |
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| O lost too soon!—yet why lament a fate | |
| By thousands envied and by Heaven approved? | |
| Rare is the boon to those of longer date | |
| To live, to die, admired, esteemed, beloved. | 40 |
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| Weak are our judgments, and our passions warm, | |
| And slowly dawns the radiant morn of truth, | |
| Our expectations hastily we form, | |
| And much we pardon to ingenuous youth. | |
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| Too oft we satiate on the applause we pay | 45 |
| To rising merit, and resume the crown; | |
| Full many a blooming genius, snatched away, | |
| Has fallen lamented who had lived unknown. * * * * * | |
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