Classic Poem

Listen! a few short hours
My soul's dark veil will lift;
Take then these fading flowers,
Prize and preserve the gift!

How they were prized when mine,
How wretched from where they dwelt,
When my parch'd lip pressed thine
Who knows, but I that felt?

Pledges of rapture then!
The symbols now of grief—
Take to thy breast agen
These flow'rs, than life less brief.

And if that breast have sense
Of Love or of Despair,
Think how I snatched them thence,
And how returned them there!