Samuel Rogers

“Pleasures of Memory!—oh supremely blest,
And justly proud beyond a Poet's praise;
If the pure confines of thy tranquil breast
Contain, indeed, the subject of thy lays!
By me how envied!—for to me,
The herald still of misery,
Memory makes her influence known
By sighs, and tears, and grief alone:
I greet her as the fiend, to whom belong
The vulture's ravening beak, the raven's funeral song.
She tells of time mispent, of comfort lost,
Of fair occasions gone for ever by;
Of hopes too fondly nurs'd, too rudely cross'd,
Of many a cause to wish, yet fear to die;
For what, except th' instinctive fear
Lest she survive, detains me here,
When "all the life of life" is fled?—
What, but the deep inherent dread,
Lest she beyond the grave resume her reign,
And realize the hell that priests and beldams feign?”
― Samuel Rogers, Poems