Classic Poem

A tulip blossomed, one morning in May,
By the side of a sanded alley;
Its leaves were dressed in a rich array,
Like the clouds at the earliest dawn of day,
When the mist rolls over the valley:
The dew had descended the night before,
And lay in its velvet bosom,
And its spreading urn was flowing o'er,
And the crystal heightened the tints it bore
On its yellow and crimson blossom.

A sweet red-rose, on its bending thorn,
Its bud was newly spreading,
And the flowing effulgence of early morn
Its beams on its breast was shedding;
The petals were heavy with dripping tears,
That twinkled in pearly brightness,
And the thrush in its covert thrilled my ears
With a varied song of lightness.

A lily, in mantle of purest snow,
Hung over a silent fountain,
And the wave, in its calm and quiet flow,
Displayed its silken leaves below,
Like the drift on the windy mountain;
It bowed with the moisture the night had wept,
When the stars shone over the billow,
And white-winged spirits their vigils kept,
Where beauty and innocence sweetly slept
On its pure and thornless pillow.

A hyacinth lifted its purple bell
From the slender leaves around it;
It curved its cup in a flowing swell,
And a starry circle crowned it;
The deep-blue tincture that robed it seemed
The gloomiest garb of sorrow,
As if on its eye no brightness beamed,
And it never in clearer moments dreamed
Of a fair and a calm to-morrow.

A daisy peeped from the tufted sod,
In its bashful modesty drooping;
Where often the morn, as I lightly trod,
In bounding youth, the fallow clod,
Had over it seen me stooping;
It looked in my face with a dewy eye
From its ring of ruby lashes,
And it seemed that a brighter was lurking by,
The fires of whose ebony lustre fly
Like summer's dazzling flashes.

And the wind, with a soft and silent wing,
Brushed over this wild of flowers,
And it wakened the birds, who began to sing
Their hymn to the season of love and spring,
In the shade of the bending bowers;
And it culled their full nectareous store,
In its lightly fluttering motion,
As when from Hybla's murmuring shore
The evening breeze from her thyme-beds bore
Their sweetness over the ocean.