Classic Poem

He stood bewildered on his lonely hearth,
Sadness was written on his fixed brow,
For he had witnessed days of holy mirth
Where silence dwells and desolation now.
The grief he felt he cared not to avow.
Calmly he stood, yet sorrowfully too,
The latest leaf upon the topmost bough
Of the green olive that so lately threw
Aloft its leafy arms when the glad spring was new.

Friendless and homeless! How unlike the past!
Once honored scion of a noble stem;
But now forsaken, desolate, the last
Bright jewel of a kingly diadem;
The last dim dew-drop of all those that gem
The still lone valley where the sunbeams fall.
He trod his ancient hills, but found on them
Nought but his shivered altar-shrines, for all
Was tomb-like hushed, and dark as with a funeral pall.