| |
| WHY moves to mournful measures slow | |
| Yon sable retinue of wo, | |
| With tearful eye and visage pale? | |
| And why this universal gloom? | |
| Sure Nature trembles o’er her tomb, | 5 |
| And bids her wilder’d children wail! | |
| |
| Do plagues infest, do wars alarm, | |
| Has God in wrath made bare his arm, | |
| To hurl his bolts of vengeance round? | |
| Have towns been sack’d by hostile ire, | 10 |
| Have cities sunk in floods of fire, | |
| While earthquakes shook the shuddering ground? | |
| |
| Ah! no, thy sons, Columbia, mourn, | |
| A hero past that fatal “bourne | |
| From whence no traveller returns;” | 15 |
| Before him none more good, more great, | |
| E’er felt th’ unerring shafts of fate, | |
| Though glory’s lamp illume their urns. | |
| |
| Behold yon pallid war-worn chief, | |
| A marble monument of grief, | 20 |
| Who once our troops to victory led;— | |
| The burst of sorrow now control, | |
| But now the tears of anguish roll, | |
| A tribute to th’ immortal dead! | |
| |
| Fain would the muse those virtues scan, | 25 |
| Which dignified the godlike man, | |
| And launch in seas without a shore; | |
| But sure his name alone conveys | |
| More than a thousand hymns of praise, | |
| The matchless Washington ’s no more! | 30 |
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