Chapter XXXIV

But he, whose pure affection blest
With friendship’s flame my days of rest,
My brother--generous, brave, and gay,[A]
Where sleep his limbs in dull decay?
Enshrin’d not were his relics cold,
O’er his deep grave no prayer was told;
No sigh breath’d softly o’er his bier,
And none, save strangers, shed a tear;
A last sad tear, at life’s dark close,
The end of all our joys and woes.
There famine’s meagre power was nigh,
Sunk was the cheek, the hollow eye,
Rob’d of its lustre, dimly view’d
One mighty sweep of billows rude;
No happy isle strikes on its fading beam,
Faintly its orb emits a dying gleam;
He turns, instinctive, his receding sight,
Towards that dear land where first he saw the light.
Then did remembrance, to his anguish’d heart,
Each youthful scene, with all its joys impart;
Barb’d every pang that rent his laboring breast,
And death’s pale form in tenfold horrors drest:
Then, came that tender, momentary thought,
With wildest, deepest, mortal anguish fraught,
It dwelt on those, who, in the morn of life
Had blest his boyhood, free from noise and strife:
Then, as his last, his lonely prayers arise,
On the wild blast, he struggles, gasps, and dies!--
Midst coral caves, in ocean’s bosom deep,
Brother belov’d! O tranquil be thy sleep!
Round the gay clusters of the green Ladrones,
The sea-gale sighs, the rushing billow moans,
There murm’rings soft, shall lull thy form to rest;
Thy soul shall dwell in regions of the blest.

[A] One of the company of the ship Resource, lost in the China seas,
Nov. 20th, 1818.