Landon in The Literary Gazette 1834/Memory
3
Literary Gazette, 25th January, 1834, Page 63
ORIGINAL POETRY.
MEMORY.
It is fading around me, that shadowy splendour
That haunts the red twilight, the vague and the vain;
Those warm clouds their fugitive blush must surrender,
And colourless melt in the dim air again.
They will leave no remembrance to tell of the glory
Dissolving at sunset away in the west;
They are gone, and the page of the air has no story,
Recalling the beauty with which it was blest.
And thus with our memory—too light are its traces
Of joy or of sorrow experienced of yore;
The shadow of life each soft colour effaces,
And the past has one sorrowing echo—no more!
Ah! childhood was lovely; but what of its hours,
The bright and the buoyant, what relics have they?
I cannot repaint the green leaves, the glad flowers,
That once made the beauty of earth and of day.
I well can recall the old lime-trees hung o'er me,
The bees and the pale blossoms thick o'er each bough;
But the dreams of my future, that brightened before me,
What were they? I cannot remember them now.
And youth has no chronicle left of its dreaming,
When hope, the sweet alchemist, ruled; and we took
The future on trust, and the present on seeming,
And each old deceit wore a bright and glad look.
Methinks it would make the dark actual less dreary,
Could we call back the feelings we formerly knew;
The path where we loiter for flowers is less weary
Than that which speeds on, the goal only in view.
The heart spends its treasure at once; we should cherish
The thought of our feelings, so live them again;
Too early the bright tints of phantasy perish
And too soon the gilding is worn from life's chain.
Vain, vain, this desire for the past! To remember
Is not to recall;—would to Heaven that it were!
The second green leaf that may shoot in November
Is but a pale mockery of what was so fair.
The hope that betrayed, and the love that deceived us,
Could we live did they keep their first early regrets?
Amid all of which Time in its course has bereaved us,
Well the heart may rejoice in how much it forgets!
L. E. L.