Felicia Hemans in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine Volume 25 1829/The Return
Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 25, Pages 570-571
SONGS OF THE AFFECTIONS.
BY MRS HEMANS.
IV.
THE RETURN.
Oh! bid him reverence, in his manhood's prime
His youth's bright morning-dream.
Don Carlos.
"Art thou come with the heart of thy childhood back,
The free, the pure, the kind?"
—So murmur'd the trees in my homeward track,
As they play'd to the mountain wind:
"Hast thou been true to thine early love?
Whisper'd my native streams;
"Doth the spirit, rear'd amidst hill and grove,
Still revere its first high dreams?"
"Hast thou borne in thy bosom the holy prayer
Of the child in his parent-halls?"—
Thus breathed a voice on the thrilling air
From the old ancestral walls:
"Hast thou kept thy faith with the faithful dead,
Whose place of rest is nigh?
With the father's blessing o'er thee shed?
With the mother's trusting eye?"
Then my tears gush'd forth in sudden rain,
As I answer'd—"O ye shades!
I bring not my childhood's heart again
To the freedom of your glades!
"I have turn'd from my first pure love aside,
O bright rejoicing streams!
Light after light in my soul have died
The early glorious dreams!
"And the holy prayer from my thoughts hath pass'd,
The prayer at my mother's knee—
Darken'd and troubled I come at last,
Thou home of my boyish glee!
"But I bear from my childhood a gift of tears
To soften and atone;
And, O ye scenes of those blessed years!
They shall make me again your own."