The Last Hours

To him who, in the love of Nature,
Holds communion with her visible forms,
She speaks a various language. 
For his gayer hours she has a voice of gladness,
And a smile and eloquence of beauty;
And she glides into his darker musings
With a mild and gentle sympathy,
That steals away their sharpness, ere he is aware. 
When thoughts of the last bitter hour
Come like a blight over they spirit,
And sad images of the stern agony, and shroud,
And pall, and breathless darkness, and the narrow house,
Make thee to shudder and grow sick at heart,
Go forth into the open sky,
And list to Nature's teachings,
While from all around Earth and her waters,
And the depths of air comes a still voice: Yet a few days,
And thee the all-beholding sun
Shall see no more in all his course;
Nor yet in the cold ground Where thy pale form was laid,
With many tears....
Nor in the embrace of ocean, shall exist thy image. 
Earth, that nourished thee, shall claim thy growth,
To be resolved to earth again;
And lost each human trace,
Surrendering up thine individual being,
Shalt thou go to mix for ever with the elements,
To be a brother to the insensible rock
And to the sluggish clod,
Which the rude swain turns with his shoe and treads upon. 
The oak shall send his roots abroad, and pierce thy mould.
Yet not to thy eternal resting place shalt thou retire alone;
Nor couldst thou wish couch more magnificent. 
Thou shalt lie down with patriarchs of the infant world -
With kings, the powerful of the earth; the wise,
The good, fair forms, and hoary seers of ages past,
All in one mighty sepulchre. 
The hills, rock-ribbed and ancient as the sun;
The vales, stretching in pensive quietness between;
The venerable woods; rivers that move in majesty;
And the complaining brooks that make the meadow green;
And poured round all, old ocean's gray and melancholy waste
Are but the solemn decorations all of the great tomb of Man. 
The golden sun, the planets, all the infinite host of Heaven,
Are shining on the sad abodes of Death,
Through the still lapse of ages. 
All that tread the globe are but a handful
To the tribes that slumber on its bosom. 
Take the wings of morning, and the barren desert pierce;
Or lose thyself in the continuous woods where rolls the Oregon,
And hears no sound save his own dashings,
Yet, the dead are there;
And millions in those solitude's,
Since first the flight of years began,
Have laid them down in their last sleep -
The dead reign there alone.
So shalt thou rest;
And what if thou fall unnoticed by the living,
And no friend take note of thy departure? 
All that breathe will share thy destiny. 
The gay will laugh when thou art gone,
The solemn brood of care plod on,
And each one, as before, will chase his favourite phantom! 
Yet all these shall leave their mirth and their employment's,
And shall come and make their bed with thee. 
As the long train of ages glides away,
The sons of men, the youth in life's green spring,
And he who goes in the full strength of years,
Matron, and maid, the bow'd with age, the infant,
In the smiles and beauty of its innocent age cut off -
Shall, one by one, be gathered to thy side,
By those who, in their turn, shall follow them.
So live that, when thy summons comes to join
The innumerable caravan that moves to the pale realms of shade,
Where each shall take his chamber in the silent halls of death,
Thou go not like the quarry slave at night, scourged to his dungeon;
But, sustained and soothed by an unfaltering trust,
Approach thy grave....
Like one who wraps the drapery of his couch about him,
And lies down to pleasant dreams.


William Cullen Bryant