Once again have I roamed thro' the old-fashioned house,
Where my grandfather spent his ninety years.
There are strangers in charge, and the change they have wrought--
Oh! it saddens me, even to tears.
...
'Tis noon of night; the sable clouds,
Hang weeping in the sky;
Alone I sit, where fancies flit
Like spectral shadows by.
...
Off on the prairie, where the balmy air
Kisses the waving corn,
There lives a farmer, with a daughter fair--
Fair as a summer's morn!
...
An echo floats down from the mountains,
And finds on the prairies release;
An echo whose wonderful burden
Is "Victory! Liberty! Peace!"
...
In the village where he married,
Doctor Eldebury tarried;
And for fourty years our people knew him well.
How he listered us and bled us,
...
To his home, his once white, once lov'd cottage,
Late at night, a poor inebriate came;
To his wife, the waiting wife and daughter
Who for him had fann'd the midnight flame.
...
On a summer's day while the waves were rippling, with a quiet and a gentle breeze;
A ship set sail with a cargo laden for a port beyond the sea.
Did she ever return? No, she never returned, and her fate is still unlearned,
...
The morning was fearful at sea--
The voyagers weary and pale;
Their steamer a wreck, from keel to deck,
Before an Autumnal gale.
...
Riding in the Park, or down town shopping
At the Matinee, or singing in the choir
Everywhere a dazzling blaze of beauty
Blinds my eyes and sets my soul afire
...
I'm de only one left ob de Colony niggers;
How things do meander away!
When dey count my yeahs dey break down on de figgers,--
Fer things will meander away.
...