The Poetical Writings of Fitz-Greene Halleck/Lamentings

by Fitz-Greene Halleck and Joseph Rodman Drake

LAMENTINGS.

“I cannot but remember such things were,
And were most precious to me.”

Macduff.

h! where are now the lights that shed
A lustre o’er my darkened hours,
The priests of pleasure’s fane, who spread,
Each night beneath my weary head,
Endymion’s moonlight couch of flowers?

No more in chains of music bound,
I listen to those airy reels,
When quavering Philipps cuts around
Fantastic pigeon-wings of sound,
Like Byrne,⁶⁷ who, without touching ground,
Eleven times can cross his heels.

No longer Cooper’s tongue of tongues,
Pumps thunder from his stormy lungs;
Turner⁶⁸ has shut his classic pages,
Southward his face Magenis⁶⁸ turns,
And for the halls of Congress spurns
The mansion of our civic sages.

And Wallack,⁶⁹ too, no longer dips
In bathos, for the tragic prize;
And Bartley,⁶⁹ a melalogue that slips
Melodious from her honeyed lips,
No more in murmured music dies.

Yet, though fell Fortune has bereft
My heart of all, one mode is left
In slumber’s vision to restore ’em;
Weekly I’ll buy with pious pence,
A dose of opiate eloquence,
And sleep in quiet at the Forum.

D.