A Sacred Grove

Here Silence is the queen of time; her hand
Is raised—and the tide trembles to a pause.
Beauty, too awful to be loved, awakes
And spell-binds Man’s repose. The sunken sun,
Whose mantle’s gold is melted in the tint
Of evening’s purple sadness, near the west
Lingers awhile, as loth to quit the scene.
Yet ’tis not sadness all; for though the trees,
Heavy with cumbrous melancholy, sweep
Their sombre-foliaged boughs close to the grass,
And solemn twilight peers between the trunks,
Tinging the dome of yonder vacant fane—
O’er all a spirit of subdued emotion
Breathes in pathetic sweetness, deep diffused.

In this dim palace of grey Solitude,
Where not a sigh wafts o’er the lily’s urn,
And nought, save marble forms of tenderest grace,
With pensive attitude stand in lone bowers—
The heart, upheaving into the fresh air,
Itself abandons to the scene, and claims
Kindred with placid Death, and those lost hopes
That lived around the loved ones, now no more.
Their tombs smile pale beneath these cypress boughs,
Heavy with memory of all the past.

Moveless I stand before these moveless trees—
Breathless as those broad boughs; and gazing thus,
At the dark foliage imaged in the pools,
Which deepen, as the brooding mind surveys
Their trance and awful beauty; ’tis a scene
That lures us backward to an elder time,
Through ages dim—and, thence, into a realm
Whose secret influence fills us with its soul—
Shadows of things which are not of the world,
And hopes that burn, yet find no vent save tears.