"Now Spring returns; but not to mo returns
The vernal joy my better years have known;
Dim in my breast life's dying taper burns,
And all the joys of life with health are flown.
Starting and shivering in th' inconstant wind,
Meagre and pale, the ghost of what I was,
Beneath some blasted tree I lie reclined,
And count the silent moments as they pass:
The winged moments, whose unstaying speed
No art can stop or in their course arrest;
Whose flight shall shortly count me with the dead,
And lay me down in peace with them that rest.
Oft morning dreams presage approaching fate;
And morning dreams, as poets tell, are true:
Led by pale ghosts, I enter death's dark gate,
And bid the realms of light and life adieu.
I hear the helpless wail, the shriek of woe;
I see the muddy wave, the dreary shore,
The sluggish streams that slowly creep below,
Which mortals visit, and return no more.
Farewell, ye blooming fields! ye cheerful plains!
Enough for me the churchyard's lonely mound,
Where melancholy with still silence reigns,
And the rank grass waves o'er the cheerless ground.
There let me wander at the close of eve,
When sleep sits dewy on the labourer's eyes,
The world and its busy follies leave,
And talk with wisdom where my Daphnis lies.
There let me sleep forgotten in the clay,
When death shall shut these weary aching eyes,
Rest in the hope of an eternal day,
Till the long night is gone, and the last morn arise."
These were the last verses finished by the author. His strength was wasted gradually away, and he died on the 6th of July, 1767, in the 21st year of his age. What he might have accomplished had longer years been assigned to him, it were needless to conjecture; but of all the sons of genius cut off by an early death, there is none whose fate excites so tender a regret. His claims to admiration are great without any counteracting circumstance. "Nothing," says Lord Craig, after a brief allusion to the leading facts of Bruce's life,—"Nothing, methinks, has more the power of awakening benevolence than the consideration of genius thus depressed by situation, suffered to pine in obscurity, and sometimes, as in the case of this unfortunate young man, to perish, it may be, for want of those comforts and conveniences which might have fostered a delicacy of frame or of mind ill calculated to bear the hardships which poverty lays on both. For my own part, I never pass the place (a little hamlet skirted with old ash-trees, about two miles on this side of Kinross) where Michael Bruce resided—I never look on his dwelling (a small thatched house distinguished from the cottages of the other inhabitants only by a sashed window at the end, instead of a lattice, fringed with a honeysuckle plant which the poor youth had trained around it)—I never find myself in that spot but I stop my horse involuntarily, and looking on the window, which the honeysuckle has now almost covered, in the dream of
