Classic Poem

BY HARVEY D. LITTLE .

How art thou fallen, mighty one!
Queen of the desert's arid brow!
The evening's shade, the morning's sun,
Rest only on thy ruins how.
Thine hour is o'er, thy glory done,
A dreary waste thy charms endow!

In thy proud days thou seem'dst a star,
Amidst a desert's sullen gloom,
Shedding thy radiance afar
O'er nature's solitary tomb.
But time, whose gentlest touch can mar,
Hath scar'd thy tall palmettoc's bloom.

The shouts of joy — the voice of mirth,
That waked to life thy marble domes:
Thy crowded marls — thy peopled earth —
Thy sculptur'd halls, and sacred homes,
Are silent now. Thy faded worth
A barren wilderness entombs.

The savage beast hath made his lair,
Where pomp and power once held their sway;
And Silence, with a fearful air,
Sits darkly brooding o'er decay;
And marble fanes, divinely fair,
Have bowed beneath thine evil day.

Round polish'd shafts the ivy twines
A wreath funereal for thy fate;
And through thy temptes' broken shrines
The moaning wind sweeps desolate.
But the mild star of evening shines
Benignly o'er thy fallen state.

Oh, how thy silence chills the heart
Of the lone traveller, whose tread
Is o'er the fragments of thine art,
Thou wondrous City of the Dead!
Thy glory cannot yet depart,
Though all of life hath from thee fled.