ΤΟ ** 1801. To be the theme of every hour In the mind's purest seat to dwell, By one whose heart, though vain and wild, The feeling soul's divinest glow! In pleasure's dream or sorrow's hour, And, though that heart be dead to mine, Of something I should long to warm, The bright, cold burthen of my way! SONG. TAKE back the sigh, thy lips of art Take back the kiss, that faithless sigh Yet, no-the fatal kiss may lie, Upon thy lip its sweets would die, Or bloom to make a rival blest! Take back the vows that, night and day, Yet, no-allow them still to stay, As sweetly as they've ruin'd mine! A BALLAD. THE LAKE OF THE DISMAL SWAMP. Written at Norfolk, in Virginia. "They tell of a young man, who lost his mind upon the death of a girl he loved, and who, suddenly disappearing from his friends, was never afterwards heard of. As he had frequently said, in his ravings, that the girl was not dead, but gone to the Dismal Swamp, it is supposed he had wandered into that dreary wilderness, and had died of hunger, or been lost in some of its dreadful morasses.” ANON “THEY made her a grave, too cold and damp "For a soul so warm and true; "And she's gone to the Lake of the Dismal Swamp,* "Where, all night long, by a fire-fly lamp, "She paddles her white canoe. * The Great Dismal Swamp is ten or twelve miles distant from Norfolk, and the Lake in the middle of it (about seven miles long) is called Drummond's Pond. F "And her fire-fly lamp I soon shall see, "And her paddle I soon shall hear; Long and loving our life shall be, "And I'll hide the maid in a cypress tree, "When the footstep of death is near!" Away to the Dismal Swamp he speeds- And, when on the earth he sunk to sleep, He lay, where the deadly vine doth weep The flesh with blistering dew! And near him the she-wolf stirr'd the brake, And the copper-snake breath'd in his ear, Till he starting cried, from his dream awake, "Oh! when shall I see the dusky Lake, "And the white canoe of my dear?" He saw the Lake, and a meteor bright "Welcome," he said, "my dear-one's light!" And the dim shore echoed, for many a night, The name of the death-cold maid! |