Went pouring forward with impetuous speed, And swiftly forming in the ranks of war; And the deep thunder peal on peal afar; And near, the beat of the alarming drum Roused up the soldier ere the morning star; While throng'd the citizens with terror dumb,

Or whispering with white lips-"The foe! They come ! they come!" 225

And wild and high the “Cameron's Gathering" rose,

The war-note of Lochiel, which Albyn's hills Have heard, and heard, too, have her Saxon

foes;

Of its own beauty is the mind diseased, And fevers into false creation; — where, Where are the forms the sculptor's soul hath seized?

In him alone. Can Nature show so fair? Where are the charms and virtues which we dare

Conceive in boyhood and pursue as men, The unreach'd Paradise of our despair, Which o'er-informs the pencil and the pen, And overpowers the page where it would bloom again? 1098

Who loves, raves 'tis youth's frenzy — but the cure

Is bitterer still; as charm by charm unwinds

1 chariot

THE PRISONER OF CHILLON

My hair is gray, but not from years;
Nor grew it white
In a single night,

As men's have grown from sudden fears:
My limbs are bow'd, though not with toil,
But rusted with a vile repose,

For they have been a dungeon's spoil,

And mine has been the fate of those
To whom the goodly earth and air
Are bann'd, and barr'd - forbidden fare; 10
But this was for my father's faith

I suffer'd chains and courted death:
That father perish'd at the stake
For tenets he would not forsake;
And for the same his lineal race
In darkness found a dwelling-place.
We were seven-who now are one;
Six in youth, and one in age,
Finish'd as they had begun,

Proud of Persecution's rage;
One in fire, and two in field,
Their belief with blood have seal'd
Dying as their father died,
For the God their foes denied ; ·
Three were in a dungeon cast,
Of whom this wreck is left the last.

There are seven pillars of Gothic mould,
In Chillon's dungeon deep and old;
There are seven columns, massy and gray,
Dim with a dull imprison'd ray,
A sunbeam which hath lost its way,
And through the crevice and the cleft
Of the thick wall is fallen and left:
Creeping o'er the floor so damp,
Like a marsh's meteor lamp:
And in each pillar there is a ring,

And in each ring there is a chain;
That iron is a cankering thing,

For in these limbs its teeth remain,

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1 The castle of Chillon covers a huge rock at the eastern end of Lake Geneva (Lake Leman).