| |
| THE SAD and solemn night | |
| Has yet her multitude of cheerful fires; | |
| The glorious host of light | |
| Walk the dark hemisphere till she retires: | |
| All through her silent watches, gliding slow, | 5 |
| Her constellations come, and round the heavens, and go. | |
| |
| Day, too, hath many a star | |
| To grace his gorgeous reign, as bright as they: | |
| Through the blue fields afar, | |
| Unseen, they follow in his flaming way: | 10 |
| Many a bright lingerer, as the eve grows dim, | |
| Tells what a radiant troop arose and set with him. | |
| |
| And thou dost see them rise, | |
| Star of the Pole! and thou dost see them set. | |
| Alone, in thy cold skies, | 15 |
| Thou keep’st thy old unmoving station yet, | |
| Nor join’st the dances of that glittering train, | |
| Nor dipp’st thy virgin orb in the blue western main. | |
| |
| There, at morn’s rosy birth, | |
| Thou lookest meekly through the kindling air, | 20 |
| And eve, that round the earth | |
| Chases the day, beholds thee watching there; | |
| There noontide finds thee, and the hour that calls | |
| The shapes of polar flame to scale heaven’s azure walls. | |
| |
| Alike, beneath thine eye, | 25 |
| The deeds of darkness and of light are done; | |
| High towards the star-lit sky | |
| Towns blaze—the smoke of battle blots the sun— | |
| The night-storm on a thousand hills is loud— | |
| And the strong wind of day doth mingle sea and cloud. | 30 |
| |
| On thy unaltering blaze | |
| The half-wreck’d mariner, his compass lost, | |
| Fixes his steady gaze, | |
| And steers, undoubting, to the friendly coast; | |
| And they who stray in perilous wastes, by night, | 35 |
| Are glad when thou dost shine to guide their footsteps right. | |
| |
| And, therefore, bards of old, | |
| Sages, and hermits of the solemn wood, | |
| Did in thy beams behold | |
| A beauteous type of that unchanging good, | 40 |
| That bright eternal beacon, by whose ray | |
| The voyager of time should shape his heedful way. | |
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