When the flowers of Friendship or Love have decayed
In the heart that has trusted and once been betray’d,
No sunshine of kindness their bloom can restore.
For the verdure of feeling will quicken no more!
Hope, cheated too often when life’s in its spring,
From the bosom that nursed it for ever takes wing;
And memory comes, as its promises fade,
To brood o’er the havoc that passion has made,—
As ’tis said that the swallow the tenement leaves
Where ruin endangers her nest in the eaves.
While the desolate owl takes her place on the wall,
And builds in the mansion that nods to its fall.