Select Poetry.

Hawke's Bay Weekly Times, Volume 2, Issue 79, 13 July 1868, Page 167

Select Poetry.

"BY THE WATERS OE BABYLON." *■l Sift* 5 Sflt 118 down and wept ... • Where Babel's waters slept, And we thought of home and Zion as a long-gone happy dream; We hung our harps in air On the willow boughs, which there, Gloomy as round a sepulchre, were drooping o’er the stream.

The foes whose chain we wore Were with us on the shore, Exulting in our tears that told the bitterness of woe.

* Sing ns,’ they cried aloud, ‘ Ve once so high and proud, The songs ye sang in Zion ere we laid her glory low.*

And shall the harp of Heaven To Judah’s monarch given, Be touched by captive fingers, or grace a fettered hand?

Mol sooner be my tongue Mute, powerless, and unstrung, Than its words of holy music make glad a stranger land.

May this right hand, whose «viii Can wake the harp at will, And bid the list’ner’s joys or griefs in light or darkness come, Forget its godlike power, If for one brief, dark hour My heart forgets Jerusalem, fallen city of my home 1 ’ J F. G. Halleck.