THE DIAL.

THIS shadow on the Dial's face,

That steals from day to day,

With slow, unseen, unceasing pace,

Moments, and months, and years away

This shadow, which, in every clime,

Since light and motion first began,

Hath held its course sublime ;

What is it?

-Mortal Man!

It is the scythe of TIME:

-A shadow only to the eye;

Yet, in its calm career,

It levels all beneath the sky;

And still, through each succeeding year,

Right onward, with resistless power,

Its stroke shall darken every hour,

Till Nature's race be run,

And TIME's last shadow shall eclipse the sun.

Nor only o'er the Dial's face,

This silent phantom, day by day,

With slow, unseen, unceasing pace,

Steals moments, months, and years away;

From hoary rock and aged tree,

From proud Palmyra's mouldering walls,

From Teneriffe, towering o'er the sea,
From every blade of grass it falls;

For still, where'er a shadow sweeps,
The scythe of Time destroys,

And man at every footstep weeps

O'er evanescent joys;

Life's flowerets glittering with the dews of morn,

Fair for a moment, then for ever shorn:

9

-Ah! soon, beneath the inevitable blow,

I too shall lie in dust and darkness low.

Then TIME, the Conqueror, will suspend
His scythe, a trophy, o'er my tomb,

Whose moving shadow shall portend

Each frail beholder's doom.

O'er the wide earth's illumined space,

Though TIME's triumphant flight be shewn,

The truest index on its face

Points from the church-yard stone.

THE ROSES;

Addressed to a Friend, on the Birth of his first Child.

Two Roses on one slender spray,

In sweet communion grew,

Together hail'd the morning ray,

And drank the evening dew;

While sweetly wreath'd in mossy green,

There sprang a little bud between.

Through clouds and sunshine, storms and showers,

They open'd into bloom,

Mingling their foliage and their flowers,

Their beauty and perfume;

While foster'd on its rising stem,

The bud became a purple gem.

But soon their summer splendour pass'd,

They faded in the wind,

Yet were these Roses to the last,

The loveliest of their kind,

Whose crimson leaves, in falling round, Adorn'd and sanctified the ground.

When thus were all their honours shorn,

The bud unfolding rose,

And blush'd and brighten'd, as the morn From dawn to sunrise glows,

Till o'er each parent's drooping head, The daughter's crowning glory spread.

My Friends! in youth's romantic prime, The golden age of man,