Oh! the strife of this divided being!

Is there peace where ye are borne on high? Could we soar to your proud eyeries fleeing, In our hearts would haunting memories die?

Those wild places are not as a dwelling

Whence the footsteps of the loved are gone! Never from those rocky halls came swelling Voice of kindness in familiar tone!

Surely music of oblivion sweepeth

In the pathway of your wanderings free ;
And the torrent, wildly as it leapeth,
Sings of no lost home amidst its glee.

There the rushing of the falcon's pinion,
Is not from some hidden pang to fly;

All things breathe of power and stern dominion-
Not of hearts that in vain yearnings die.

Mountain winds! oh! is it, is it only

Where man's trace hath been that so we pine? Bear me up, to grow in thought less lonely,

Even at nature's deepest, loneliest shrine !

Wild, and mighty, and mysterious singers!

At whose tone my heart within me burns; Bear me where the last red sunbeam lingers, Where the waters have their secret urns!

There to commune with a loftier spirit
Than the troubling shadows of regret ;

There the wings of freedom to inherit,

Where the enduring and the wing'd are met.

Hush, proud voices! gentle be your falling!
Woman's lot thus chainless may not be;
Hush the heart your trumpet sounds are calling,
Darkly still may grow-but never free!

THE PROCESSION.

"The peace which passeth all understanding," disclosed it

self in her looks and movements.

It lay on her countenance

like a steady unshadowed moonlight.

COLERIDGE.

THERE were trampling sounds of many feet,
And music rush'd through the crowded street;
Proud music, such as tells the sky,

Of a chief returned from victory.

There were banners to the winds unroll'd,
With haughty words on each blazon'd fold;
High battle-names, which had rung of yore,
When lances clash'd on the Syrian shore.

Borne from their dwellings, green and lone,

There were flowers of the woods on the pathway strown;

And wheels that crush'd as they swept along

Oh! what doth the violet amidst the throng?

I saw where a bright Procession pass'd
The gates of a Minster, old and vast ;
And a king to his crowning place was led,
Through a sculptur'd line of the warrior dead.

I saw, far gleaming, the long array

Of trophies, on those high tombs that lay,
And the coloured light, that wrapp'd them all,
Rich, deep, and sad, as a royal pall.

But a lowlier grave soon won mine eye
Away from th' ancestral pageantry :
A grave by the lordly Minster's gate,
Unhonour'd, and yet not desolate.

It was but a dewy greensward bed,

Meet for the rest of a peasant head;

But Love-Oh! lovelier than all beside!That lone place guarded and glorified.

For a gentle form stood watching there,
Young-but how sorrowfully fair!
Keeping the flowers of the holy spot,
That reckless feet might profane them not.

Clear, pale and clear, was the tender cheek,
And her eye, though tearful, serenely meek;
And I deem'd, by its lifted gaze of love,
That her sad heart's treasure was all above.

For alone she seem'd 'midst the throng to be, Like a bird of the waves far away at sea; Alone, in a mourner's vest array'd,

And with folded hands, e'en as if she pray'd.