Take
wings of foresight; lighten thro’
The secular abyss to come,
And lo, thy deepest lays are dumb
Before
the mouldering of a yew;
And
if the matin songs, that woke
The darkness of our planet, last,
Thine own shall wither in the vast,
Ere
half the lifetime of an oak.
Ere
these have clothed their branchy bowers
With fifty Mays, thy songs are vain;
And what are they when these remain
The
ruin’d shells of hollow towers?