To the Dying Year

Thou desolate and dying year!
Emblem of transitory man,
Whose wearisome and wild career,
Like thine, is bounded to a span;
It seems but as a little day
Since nature smiled upon thy birth,
And Spring came forth in fair array,
To dance upon the joyous earth.

Sad alteration! now how lone,
How verdureless is nature's breast,
Where ruin makes his empire known,
In autumn's yellow vesture dress'd;
The sprightly bird, whose carol sweet
Broke on the breath of early day,
The summer flowers she loved to greet;
The bird, the flowers, O! where are they?

Thou desolate and dying year!
Yet lovely in thy lifelessness
As beauty stretch'd upon the bier,
In death's clay-cold and dark caress;
There's loveliness in thy decay,
Which breathes, which lingers on thee still,
Like memory's mild and cheering ray
Beaming upon the night of ill.

Yet, yet the radiance is not gone,
Which shed a richness o'er the scene,
Which smiled upon the golden dawn,
When skies were brilliant and serene;
O! still a melancholy smile
Gleams upon Nature's aspect fair,
To charm the eye a little while,
Ere ruin spreads his mantle there!

Thou desolate and dying year!
Since time entwined thy vernal wreath,
How often love hath shed the tear,
And knelt beside the bed of death;
How many hearts, that lightly sprung
When joy was blooming but to die,
Their finest chords by death unstrung,
Have yielded life's expiring sigh,

And, pillow'd low beneath the clay,
Have ceased to melt, to breathe, to burn;
The proud, the gentle, and the gay,
Gather'd unto the mouldering urn;
While freshly flow'd the frequent tear
For love bereft, affection fled;
For all that were our blessings here,
The loved, the lost, the sainted dead!

Thou desolate and dying year!
The musing spirit finds in thee
Lessons, impressive and serene,
Of deep and stern morality;
Thou teachest how the germ of youth,
Which blooms in being's dawning day,
Planted by nature, rear'd by truth,
Withers, like thee, in dark decay.

Promise of youth ' fair as the form
Of Heaven's benign and golden bow,
Thy smiling arch begirds the storm,
And sheds a light on every wo;
Hope wakes for thee, and to her tongue
A tone of melody is given,
As if her magic voice were strung
With the empyreal fire of heaven.

And love which never can expire,
Whose origin is from on high,
Throws o'er thy morn a ray of fire,
From the pure fountains of the sky;
That ray which glows and brightens still
Unchanged, eternal and divine;
Where seraphs own its holy thrill,
And bow before its gleaming shrine.

Thou desolate and dying year!
Prophetic of our final fall;
Thy buds are gone, thy leaves are sear;
Thy beauties shrouded in the pall;
And all the garniture that shed
A brilliancy upon thy prime,
Hath like a morning vision fled
Unto the expanded grave of time.

Time! Time! in thy triumphal flight,
How all life's phantoms fleet away;
Thy smile of hope, and young delight,
Fame's meteor-beam, and Fancy's ray:
They fade; and on the heaving tide,
Rolling its stormy waves afar,
Are borne the wreck of human pride,
The broken wreck of Fortune's war.

There, in disorder, dark and wild,
Are seen the fabrics once so high;
Which mortal vanity had piled
As emblems of eternity!
And deem'd the stately piles, whose forms
Frovvn'd in their majesty sublime,
Would stand unshaken by the storms
That gather'd round the brow of Time.

Thou desolate and dying year!
Earth's brightest pleasures fade like thine;
Like evening shadows disappear,
And leave the spirit to repine.
The stream of life, that used to pour
Its fresh and sparkling waters on,
While Fate stood watching on the shore,
And number'd all the moments gone—

Where hath the morning splendour flown,
Which danced upon the crystal stream 'i
Where are the joys to childhood known,
When life was an enchanted dream?
Enveloped in the starless night
Which destiny hath overspread;
Enroll'd upon that trackless flight
Where the death-wing of time hath sped!

O! thus hath life its even-tide
Of sorrow, loneliness, and grief;
And thus, divested of its pride,
It withers like the yellow leaf:
O! such is life's autumnal bower,
When plunder'd of its summer bloom;
And such is life's autumnal hour,
Which heralds man unto the tomb!