Classic Poem

Ye midnight shades! o'er Nature spread
Dumb silence of the dreary hour;
In honour of the approaching dead
Around your awful terrors pour.
Yes, pour around
On this pale ground,
Through all this deep surrounding gloom,
The sober thought,
The tear untaught,
Those meetest mourners at a tomb.

Lo! as the surplic'd train draw near
To this last mansion of mankind,
The slow sad bell, the sable bier,
In holy musings wrap the mind!
And while their beam,
With trembling stream,
Attending tapers faintly dart,
Each mouldering bone,
Each sculptur'd stone,
Strikes mute instruction to the heart.

Now let the sacred organ blow
With solemn pause and sounding slow;
Now let the voice due measure keep,
In strains that sigh and words that weep,
Till all the vocal current blended roll,
Not to depress but lift the soaring soul.

To lift it in the Maker's praise
Who first inform'd our frame with breath,
And after some few stormy days
Now gracious gives us o'er to death.
No king of fears
In him appears
Who shuts the scene of human woes;
Beneath his shade
Securely laid
The dead alone find true repose.

Then while we mingle dust with dust,
To One supremely good and wise
Raise hallelujahs. God is just,
And man most happy when he dies.
His winter past,
Fair Spring at last
Receives him on her flowery shore,
Where pleasure's rose
Immortal blows,
And sin and sorrow are no more.