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Home  »  A Library of American Literature  »  The Daughter of Mendoza

Stedman and Hutchinson, comps. A Library of American Literature:
An Anthology in Eleven Volumes. 1891.
Vols. IX–XI: Literature of the Republic, Part IV., 1861–1889

The Daughter of Mendoza

By Mirabeau Buonaparte Lamar (1798–1859)

[Born in Louisville, Ga., 1798. Died at Richmond, Texas, 1859. Copied for this work by the late De Rosset Lamar.]

O LEND to me, sweet nightingale,

Your music by the fountain,

And lend to me your cadences,

O rivers of the mountain!

That I may sing my gay brunette,

A diamond spark in coral set,

Gem for a prince’s coronet—

The daughter of Mendoza.

How brilliant is the morning star,

The evening star how tender,—

The light of both is in her eyes,

Their softness and their splendor.

But for the lash that shades their light

They were too dazzling for the sight,

And when she shuts them, all is night—

The daughter of Mendoza.

O ever bright and beauteous one,

Bewildering and beguiling,

The lute is in thy silvery tones,

The rainbow in thy smiling;

And thine is, too, o’er hill and dell,

The bounding of the young gazelle,

The arrow’s flight and ocean’s swell—

Sweet daughter of Mendoza!

What though, perchance, we no more meet,—

What though too soon we sever?

Thy form will float like emerald light

Before my vision ever.

For who can see and then forget

The glories of my gay brunette—

Thou art too bright a star to set,

Sweet daughter of Mendoza!