THE INDIAN CITY.* What deep wounds ever closed without a scar? Childe Harold. I. ROYAL in splendor went down the day On the plain where an Indian city lay, With its crown of domes o'er the forest high, And its deep groves pierced by the rays which made * From a tale in Forbes's Oriental Memoirs. Till the pillar'd vaults of the banian stood, And the plantain glitter'd with leaves of gold, And the cypress lifted a blazing spire, And the stems of the cocoas were shafts of fire. Slept lovely round upon lake and stream, As they caught the glow of the sun's last hours, Like rosy wine in their cups, and shed With the water-vase from the palmy shade, There wandered a noble Moslem boy Through the scene of beauty in breathless joy; He gazed where the stately city rose Like a pageant of clouds in its red repose; He turn'd where birds through the gorgeous gloom And there lay the water, as if enshrined Like a falcon's glance on the wide blue sky, Like a sea-bird's flight to the foaming wave, From the shadowy bank was the bound he gave; His mother look'd from her tent the while, In the Bramin city's glorious bowers; For the pomp of the forest, the wave's bright fall, The red gold of sunset-she loved them all. II. The moon rose clear in the splendor given |