France has been deluged with her patriots' blood
By traitors to their country and their God,--
The face of Europe has been changed, but thou
Hast stood sublime in changelessness till now,
Exulting in thy glories of carved stone,
A living monument of ages gone!--
Yet--time hath touch'd thee too; thy prime is o'er,--
A few short years, and thou must be no more;
Ev'n thou must bend beneath the common fate,
But in thy very ruins wilt be great!"

More than enough of this brief memory of "Sixty Years Since," which has
no other extant record, and is only given as a sample of the rest,
equally juvenile. Three years however before, this, my earliest piece
printed, I find among my papers a very faded copy of my first MS. in
verse, being part of an attempted prize poem at Charterhouse on
Carthage, written at the age of thirteen in 1823; for auld langsyne's
sake I rescue its conclusion thus curtly from oblivion,--though no doubt
archæologically faulty:--

"Where sculptured temples once appeared to sight,
Now dismal ruins meet the moon's pale light,--
Where regal pomp once shone with gorgeous ray,
And kings successive held their transient sway;--
Where once the priest his sacred victims led
And on the altars their warm lifeblood shed,--
Where swollen rivers once had amply flowed
And splendid galleys down the stream had rowed,
A dreary wilderness now meets the view,
And nought but Memory can trace the clue!"