A Life-Lyric. Poem by William Billington

MY heart always pure homage will pay
To its Empress Poesy,
And the tapers that shine in her palace divine
Will my load-star of life still be;
My soul, sleep-crossed by dreams of the lost
Life-treasures in Hope's wrecked bark,
Must borrow a ray from the sun of Youth's day
To make Manhood's night less dark.

The loved resorts of childhood sports,
The spot where Thought first bloomed,
And blushed, and blew, and joy-buds out-threw,
Now blighted and entombed;
That glory-trance in Life's romance,
Whose glow Time's gloom ne'er shrouds,
Through Memory gleams, as the sunset streams
Through a sea of golden clouds!

As in the shade of a hollow glade
Where greening forests gloom,
A lonely Tree transfigured may be
In the light of its golden bloom,
So I bask in the beams of my youthful dreams
When immured in the Castle of Care,
Like a star ringed with gloom, or a soul in the tomb,
Or a hope in the heart of Despair.

When, brooding and black as the thunder-rack,
Grief's world-waves o'er me close,
On Poesy's wings my spirit upsprings
From a surging sea of woes,
And I live in a world which Fancy hath furled
Like a Heaven around my heart,
Lit up by the beams of my youthful dreams
Whose lustre can never depart.

The glimmering nooks by the glassy brooks
Where Oaks shook hands o'erhead,
And wild strawberries; as red as cherries,
Looked up from their lush green bed,
The rush-isle dank, and the violet bank,
The poplar's palsied leaves,
The robin's red breast, and the swallows that nest
In the straw-thatched cottage eaves;

The green hedge-rows, where the wild rose grows,
The daisy-dappled mead,
The cloud-like woods that follow the floods,
And the dawn-flushed mountain-head,
And all the range of greenery, grange,
Dim forest and flower-flushed field,
And wind-lashed trees, that surged like seas,
In Memory stand revealed!

The doves that cooed, and all birds that brood
In brake, bank, bush, or tree,
Like the lark that soars to Heaven's blue doors,
Seemed ministrant spirits to me;
Queen Fancy teems with youth's Eden-dreams,
Bewildering Sense and Thought,
And my spirit, in spite of Truth's blinding light,
Is back to my childhood brought;

For Time and Space have lost their place
On Reason's tear-dimmed chart,
And Sorrow and Hope are building a cope
O'er the tomb of a martyred Heart!
Yet I live in a world which Fancy hath furled
Like a Heaven around my soul,
Which lights Life's way from day to day,
And will gild its gloomy goal.