stood, And heard, with voice as trumpet loud, Bozzaris cheer his band. "Strike-till the last armed foe expires; Strike for your altars and your fires; Strike-for the green graves of your sires: GOD, and your native land!" They fought,-like brave men, long and well; They piled that ground with Mos lem slain; They conquered - but Bozzaris fell, Bleeding at every vein. His few surviving comrades saw His smile when rang their proud hur rah, And the red field was won: Calmly, as to a night's repose, Then saw in death his eyelids close Like flowers at set of sun. There had the glad earth drunk their Come to the bridal chamber, Death! That bright dream was his last; He woke to hear his sentries shriek, "To arms! they come! the Greek! the Greek!" He woke—to die midst flame and smoke, And shout, and groan, and sabrestroke, And death-shots falling thick and fast Come to the mother's, when she As lightnings from the mountain-But to the hero, when his sword cloud; Has won the battle for the free, Thy voice sounds like a prophet's And even she who gave thee birth, word; And in its hollow tones are heard The thanks of millions yet to be. Come, when his task of fame is wrought Come with her laurel-leaf, bloodbought Come in her crowning hour-and then Thy sunken eye's unearthly light Of sky and stars to prisoned men; And orange-groves, and fields of balm, Blew o'er the Haytien seas. Bozzaris! with the storied brave, Greece nurtured in her glory's time, Rest thee there is no prouder grave, Even in her own proud clime. She wore no funeral weeds for thee, Nor bade the dark hearse wave its plume, Like torn branch from death's leafless tree, In sorrow's pomp and pageantry, The heartless luxury of the tomb: But she remembers thee as one Long loved and for a season gone. For thee her poets' lyre is wreathed, Her marble wrought, her music breathed: For thee she rings the birthday bells; Of thee her babes' first lisping tells: For thine her evening prayer is said At palace couch, and cottage bed; Her soldier, closing with the foe, Gives for thy sake a deadlier blow; His plighted maiden, when she fears For him, the joy of her young years, Thinks of thy fate, and checks her tears. And she, the mother of thy boys, Though in her eye and faded cheek Is read the grief she will not speak, The memory of her buried joys, Will, by their pilgrim-circled hearth, Talk of thy doom without a sigh: For thou art Freedom's now, and Fame's, One of the few, the immortal names That were not born to die. A straw-thatched roof above his head, A straw-wrought couch beneath. And I have stood beside the pile, His monument-that tells to heaven The homage of earth's proudest isle To that bard-peasant given. Bid thy thoughts hover o'er that spot, Boy-minstrel, in thy dreaming hour; And know, however low his lot, The pride that lifted Burns from earth, The power that gave a child of song Ascendency o'er rank and birth, The rich, the brave, the strong; And if despondency weigh down Thy spirit's fluttering pinions then, Despair thy name is written on The roll of common men. There have been loftier themes than his, And longer scrolls, and louder lyres, And lays lit up with Poesy's Purer and holier fires; Yet read the names that know not death; Few nobler ones than Burns are there; And few have won a greener wreath Than that which binds his hair. His is that language of the heart In which the answering heart would speak, Thought, word, that bids the warm tear start, Or the smile light the cheek; And his that music to whose tone The common pulse of man keeps time, In cot or castle's mirth or moan, And who hath heard his song, nor knelt Before its spell with willing knee, And listened, and believed, and felt The poet's mastery O'er the mind's sea, in calm and storm, O'er the heart's sunshine and its showers, O'er Passion's moments, bright and warm, O'er Reason's dark, cold hours; On fields where brave men "" die or do," In halls where rings the banquet's mirth, Where mourners weep, where lovers |