Poems of Letitia Elizabeth Landon (L. E. L.) in The Keepsake, 1831/The Return
NANTES |
THE RETURN.
BY MISS L. E. LANDON.
Nantz is a fair city, but it seemed the very fairest in the world to the traveller, for he had been absent years: he left it poor, but he came back rich; and the home of his youth was again to be the home of his age.
"Drop down your oars, the waters trace
Their own path fast enough for me;
Life sometimes asks a breathing space—
Such I am fain this hour should be.
"Fair city, I am come once more;
Travel and toil are on my brow;
With all I thought so great of yore—
With all I think so little now!
"Sorrow for friends I left behind—
Misgiving fears were with me then;
And yet I bore a lighter mind
Than now I see those walls again.
"Hope is youth's prophet, and foretells
The future that its wish reveals;
The energy that in us dwells
Then judges but by what it feels.
"And it feels buoyant spirits, health,
And confidence, and earnestness;
And it ascribes such power to wealth
Which but to seek is to possess.
"The future was my own: my life
Has past as many men's have past;
Adventure, trouble, sorrow, strife,
Yet with success, and home at last.
"But Hope has fled on morning's wings,
And Memory sits with darken’d eye;
And I have learn'd life's dearest things
Are those which never wealth could buy.
"Affection's circle soon grows less—
The dead, the changed, what blanks are there!
And what avails half life's success,
No early friends can see and share?
"My heart has still turn'd back through years,
Whose shadow now around me falls;
I dread to turn to truth the fears,
The hopes in yonder city's walls.
"How fair a scene, the morning light
And human life’s most cheerful sound;
The banks so glad, the stream so bright,
I hear my native tongue around.
"Oh! for some voice I used to hear,
The grasp of one familiar hand;
So long desired, and now so near—
On, boatmen, on, I long to land."