The winds beat hard on her lovely head:
But she clasped her hands, and nothing said.
O, 'twas, I ween, a ghastly sight
To see their uncouth revelry.
The lightning was the taper bright,
The thunder was the melody,
To which they danced with horrid glee.
The fierce-eyed owl did on them scowl,
The bat played round on leathern wing,
The coal-black wolf did at them howl,
The coal-black raven did croak and sing,
And o'er them flap his dusky wing.
An earthquake heaved beneath their feet,
Pale meteors revelled in the sky,
The clouds sailed by like a routed fleet,
The night-winds shrieked as they passed by,
The dark-red moon was eclipsed on high.
[Footnote 79: One of the earliest poets of the West, but a native of
Delaware.]
* * * * *
=_Charles Sprague, 1791-._= (Manual, p. 514.)
From "Curiosity."
=_334._= THE NEWSPAPER.
Turn to the Press--its teeming sheets survey,
Big with the wonders of each passing day;
Births, deaths, and weddings, forgeries, fires, and wrecks,
Harangues and hailstorms, brawls and broken necks;
Where half-fledged bards, on feeble pinions, seek
An immortality of near a week;
Where cruel eulogists the dead restore,
In maudlin praise, to martyr them once more;
Where ruffian slanderers wreak their coward spite,
And need no venomed dagger while they write.
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