Posthumous Poems (1824)

Percy Bysshe Shelley

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Published by Liberty Fund, Inc.

Percy Bysshe Shelley, Posthumous Poems [1824]

Edition used:

Posthumous Poems (London: John and Henry L. Hunt, 1824).

Foreword: Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

Author: Percy Bysshe Shelley

A volume of poems published after Shelley’s death in 1822 with a preface by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley.

Copyright:

The text is in the public domain.

Table of Contents

PREFACE.

CONTENTS.

JULIAN AND MADDALO; A CONVERSATION.

JULIAN AND MADDALO.

THE WITCH OF ATLAS.

LETTER TO —

THE TRIUMPH OF LIFE.

FRAGMENTS FROM AN UNFINISHED DRAMA.

PRINCE ATHANASE: A FRAGMENT.

ODE TO NAPLES.*

MARIANNE’S DREAM.

MONT BLANC. LINES WRITTEN IN THE VALE OF CHAMOUNI.

MISCELLANEOUS POEMS.

ON THE MEDUSA OF LEONARDO DA VINCI, IN THE FLORENTINE GALLERY.

SONG.

TO CONSTANTIA, SINGING.

THE FUGITIVES.

A LAMENT.

THE PINE FOREST OF THE CASCINE, NEAR PISA.

TO NIGHT.

EVENING. PONTE A MARE, PISA.

ARETHUSA.

THE QUESTION.

LINES TO AN INDIAN AIR.

STANZAS WRITTEN IN DEJECTION, NEAR NAPLES.

AUTUMN: A DIRGE.

HYMN OF APOLLO.

HYMN OF PAN.

THE BOAT ON THE SERCHIO.

THE ZUCCA.*

THE TWO SPIRITS. AN ALLEGORY.

A FRAGMENT.

A BRIDAL SONG.

THE SUNSET.

SONG, ON A FADED VIOLET.

LINES TO A CRITIC.

GOOD NIGHT.

TO-MORROW.

DEATH.

A LAMENT.

LOVE’S PHILOSOPHY.

TO E*** V***

TO —

LINES.

TO WILLIAM SHELLEY.

AN ALLEGORY.

MUTABILITY.

FROM THE ARABIC. AN IMITATION.

TO —

MUSIC.

LINES.

DEATH.

TO —

PASSAGE OF THE APENNINES.

TO MARY —

THE PAST.

SONG OF A SPIRIT.

LIBERTY.

TO —

THE ISLE.

TO —

TIME.

LINES.

A SONG.

THE WORLD’S WANDERERS.

A DIRGE.

LINES.

DIRGE FOR THE YEAR.

SONNET I.

SONNET II. POLITICAL GREATNESS.

SONNET III.

SONNET IV.

FRAGMENTS.

GINEVRA.*

CHARLES THE FIRST. FRAGMENTS.

ACT I. SCENE I.

SCENE II.

SCENE III.

PRINCE ATHANASE. PART II.

FRAGMENT I.

FRAGMENT II.

FRAGMENT III.

FRAGMENT IV.

MAZENGHI.*

THE WOODMAN AND THE NIGHTINGALE.

TO THE MOON.

SONG FOR TASSO.

THE WANING MOON.

EPITAPH.

ALASTOR; OR THE SPIRIT OF SOLITUDE.

TRANSLATIONS.

HYMN TO MERCURY. TRANSLATED FROM THE GREEK OF HOMER

THE CYCLOPS; A SATYRIC DRAMA.

TRANSLATION FROM MOSCHUS.

SCENES FROM THE “MAGICO PRODIGIOSO” OF CALDERON.

SCENE II.

SCENE III.

SCENES FROM THE FAUST OF GOËTHE.

PROLOGUE IN HEAVEN.

SCENES FROM THE FAUST OF GOËTHE.

MAY-DAY NIGHT.

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POSTHUMOUS POEMS of PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY.

In nobil sangue vita umile e queta,

Ed in alto intelletto un puro core;

Frutto senile in sul giovenil fiore,

E in aspetto pensoso anima lieta.

Petrarca.

LONDON, 1824:

PRINTED FOR JOHN AND HENRY L. HUNT, TAVISTOCK STREET, COVENT GARDEN.

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LONDON:

printed by c. h. reynell, broad street, golden square.

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PREFACE.

It had been my wish, on presenting the public with the Posthumous Poems of Mr. Shelley, to have accompanied them by a biographical notice; as it appeared to me, that at this moment, a narration of the events of my husband’s life would come more gracefully from other hands than mine, I applied to Mr. Leigh Hunt. The distinguished friendship that Mr. Shelley felt for him, and the enthusiastic affection with which Mr. Leigh Hunt clings to his friend’s memory, seemed to point him out as the person best calculated for such an undertaking. His absence from this country, which prevented our mutual explanation, has unfortunately rendered my scheme abortive. I do not doubt but that on some other occasion he will pay this tribute to his lost friend, and sincerely regret that the volume which I edit has not been honoured by its insertion.

The comparative solitude in which Mr. Shelley lived, was the occassion that he was personally known to few; and his fearless enthusiasm in the cause, Edition: current; Page: [iv] which he considered the most sacred upon earth, the improvement of the moral and physical state of mankind, was the chief reason why he, like other illustrious reformers, was pursued by hatred and calumny. No man was ever more devoted than he, to the endeavour of making those around him happy; no man ever possessed friends more unfeignedly attached to him. The ungrateful world did not feel his loss, and the gap it made seemed to close as quickly over his memory as the murderous sea above his living frame. Hereafter men will lament that his transcendant powers of intellect were extinguished before they had bestowed on them their choicest treasures. To his friends his loss is irremediable: the wise, the brave, the gentle, is gone for ever! He is to them as a bright vision, whose radiant track, left behind in the memory, is worth all the realities that society can afford. Before the critics contradict me, let them appeal to any one who had ever known him: to see him was to love him; and his presence, like Ithuriel’s spear, was alone sufficient to disclose the falsehood of the tale, which his enemies whispered in the ear of the ignorant world.

His life was spent in the contemplation of nature, in arduous study, or in acts of kindness and affection. He was an elegant scholar and a profound metaphysician: without possessing much scientific knowledge, he was unrivalled in the justness and extent of his observations on natural objects; he knew every plant Edition: current; Page: [v] by its name, and was familiar with the history and habits of every production of the earth; he could interpret without a fault each appearance in the sky, and the varied phœnomena of heaven and earth filled him with deep emotion. He made his study and reading-room of the shadowed copse, the stream, the lake and the waterfall. Ill health and continual pain preyed upon his powers, and the solitude in which we lived, particularly on our first arrival in Italy, although congenial to his feelings, must frequently have weighed upon his spirits; those beautiful and affecting “Lines, written in dejection at Naples,” were composed at such an interval; but when in health, his spirits were buoyant and youthful to an extraordinary degree.

Such was his love for nature, that every page of his poetry is associated in the minds of his friends with the loveliest scenes of the countries which he inhabited. In early life he visited the most beautiful parts of this country and Ireland. Afterwards the Alps of Switzerland became his inspirers. “Prometheus Unbound” was written among the deserted and flower-grown ruins of Rome, and when he made his home under the Pisan hills, their roofless recesses harboured him as he composed “The Witch of Atlas,” “Adonais” and “Hellas.” In the wild but beautiful Bay of Spezia, the winds and waves which he loved became his playmates. His days were chiefly spent on the water; the management of his boat, its alterations and improvements, were his Edition: current; Page: [vi] principal occupation. At night, when the unclouded moon shone on the calm sea, he often went alone in his little shallop to the rocky caves that bordered it, and sitting beneath their shelter wrote “The Triumph of Life,” the last of his productions. The beauty but strangeness of this lonely place, the refined pleasure which he felt in the companionship of a few selected friends, our entire sequestration from the rest of the world, all contributed to render this period of his life one of continued enjoyment. I am convinced that the two months we passed there were the happiest he had ever known: his health even rapidly improved, and he was never better than when I last saw him, full of spirits and joy, embark for Leghorn, that he might there welcome Leigh Hunt to Italy. I was to have accompanied him, but illness confined me to my room, and thus put the seal on my misfortune. His vessel bore out of sight with a favourable wind, and I remained awaiting his return by the breakers of that sea which was about to engulph him.

He spent a week at Pisa, employed in kind offices towards his friend, and enjoying with keen delight the renewal of their intercourse. He then embarked with Mr. Williams, the chosen and beloved sharer of his pleasures and of his fate, to return to us. We waited for them in vain; the sea by its restless moaning seemed to desire to inform us of what we would not learn:—but a veil may well be drawn over such misery. The real anguish of these moments Edition: current; Page: [vii] transcended all the fictions that the most glowing imagination ever pourtrayed: our seclusion, the savage nature of the inhabitants of the surrounding villages, and our immediate vicinity to the troubled sea, combined to embue with strange horror our days of uncertainty. The truth was at last known,—a truth that made our loved and lovely Italy appear a tomb, its sky a pall. Every heart echoed the deep lament, and my only consolation was in the praise and earnest love that each voice bestowed and each countenance demonstrated for him we had lost,—not, I fondly hope, for ever: his unearthly and elevated nature is a pledge of the continuation of his being, although in an altered form. Rome received his ashes; they are deposited beneath its weed-grown wall, and “the world’s sole monument” is enriched by his remains.

I must add a few words concerning the contents of this volume. “Julian and Maddalo,” “The Witch of Atlas,” and most of the Translations, were written some years ago, and, with the exception of “The Cyclops,” and the Scenes from the “Magico Prodigioso,” may be considered as having received the author’s ultimate corrections. “The Triumph of Life” was his last work, and was left in so unfinished a state, that I arranged it in its present form with great difficulty. All his poems which were scattered in periodical works are collected in this volume, and I have added a reprint of “Alastor, or the Spirit of Solitude:”—the difficulty with which a copy can be obtained, is the cause of its republication. Edition: current; Page: [viii] Many of the Miscellaneous Poems, written on the spur of the occasion, and never retouched, I found among his manuscript books, and have carefully copied: I have subjoined, whenever I have been able, the date of their composition.

I do not know whether the critics will reprehend the insertion of some of the most imperfect among these; but I frankly own, that I have been more actuated by the fear lest any monument of his genius should escape me, than the wish of presenting nothing but what was complete to the fastidious reader. I feel secure that the Lovers of Shelley’s Poetry (who know how more than any other poet of the present day every line and word he wrote is instinct with peculiar beauty) will pardon and thank me: I consecrate this volume to them.

The size of this collection has prevented the insertion of any prose pieces. They will hereafter appear in a separate publication.

Mary W. Shelley.

London

,

June 1st, 1824

.

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CONTENTS.

Julian and Maddalo . . . . . . Page 1

The Witch of Atlas . . . . . 27

Letter to — . . . . . . 57

The Triumph of Life . . . . . 71

Fragments from an Unfinished Drama . . . 97

Prince Athanase . . . . . . 103

Ode to Naples . . . . . . 111

Marianne’s Dream . . . . . . 121

Mont Blanc . . . . . . . 129

MISCELLANEOUS POEMS.

On the Medusa of Leonardo da Vinci . . . 139

Song . . . . . . . . 141

To Constantia, singing . . . . . 143

The Fugitives . . . . . . . 145

A Lament . . . . . . 148

The Pine Forest . . . . . . 149

To Night . . . . . . . 154

Evening . . . . . . . 156

Arethusa . . . . . . . 157

The Question . . . . . . 161

Lines to an Indian Air . . . . . 163

Stanzas . . . . . . . 164

Autumn, a Dirge . . . . . . 166

Hymn of Apollo . . . . . . 167Edition: current; Page: [x]

Hymn of Pan . . . . . . 169

The Boat on the Serchio . . . . . 171

The Zucca . . . . . . 175

The Two Spirits . . . . . . 179

A Fragment . . . . . . 181

A Bridal Song . . . . . . 182

The Sunset . . . . . . 183

On a Faded Violet . . . . . . 185

Lines to a Critic . . . . . . 186

Good-Night . . . . . . . 187

To-morrow . . . . . . 188

Death . . . . . . . . 189

A Lament . . . . . . 190

Love’s Philosophy . . . . . . 191

To E*** V*** . . . . . . 192

To — . . . . . . . 193

Lines . . . . . . . 194

To William Shelley . . . . . . 196

An Allegory . . . . . . 197

Mutability . . . . . . . 198

From the Arabic . . . . . . 199

To — . . . . . . . 200

Music . . . . . . . 201

Lines . . . . . . . . 202

Death . . . . . . . 204

To — . . . . . . . 205

Passage of the Apennines . . . . 206

To Mary — . . . . . . . 207

The Past . . . . . . 208

Song of a Spirit . . . . . . 209

Liberty . . . . . . . 210

To — . . . . . . . 211

The Isle . . . . . . . 213

To — . . . . . . . 214

Time . . . . . . . 215

Lines . . . . . . . . 216

A Song . . . . . . 217Edition: current; Page: [xi]

The World’s Wanderers . . . . . 218

A Dirge . . . . . . . 219

Lines . . . . . . . . 220

Dirge for the Year . . . . . 221

Sonnet I. . . . . . . . 222

Sonnet II. . . . . . . . 223

Sonnet III. . . . . . . . 224

Sonnet IV. . . . . . . 225

FRAGMENTS.

Ginevra . . . . . . . 229

Charles the First . . . . . . 237

Prince Athanase, Part II. . . . . . 249

Mazenghi . . . . . . . 257

The Woodman and the Nightingale . . . . 260

To the Moon . . . . . . 263

Song for Tasso . . . . . . 264

The Waning Moon . . . . . 265

Epitaph . . . . . . . 266

Alastor, or the Spirit of Solitude . . . 267

TRANSLATIONS.

Hymn to Mercury, from Homer . . . . 295

The Cyclops, from Eurypides . . . . 329

Translation from Moschus . . . . . 362

Scenes from the “Magico Prodigioso” of Calderon . 363

Scenes from the “Faust” of Goëthe . . . 393

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JULIAN AND MADDALO;
A CONVERSATION.

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The meadows with fresh streams, the bees with thyme,

The goats with the green leaves of budding spring,

Are saturated not—nor Love with tears.

Virgil’s Gallus.

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JULIAN AND MADDALO.

Count Maddalo is a Venetian nobleman of ancient family and of great fortune, who, without mixing much in the society of his countrymen, resides chiefly at his magnificent palace in that city. He is a person of the most consummate genius; and capable, if he would direct his energies to such an end, of becoming the redeemer of his degraded country. But it is his weakness to be proud: he derives, from a comparison of his own extraordinary mind with the dwarfish intellects that surround him, an intense apprehension of the nothingness of human life. His passions and his powers are incomparably greater than those of other men, and instead of the latter having been employed in curbing the former, they have mutually lent each other strength. His ambition preys upon itself, for want of objects which it can consider worthy of exertion. I say that Maddalo is proud, because I can find no other word to express the concentered and impatient feelings which consume him; but it is on his own hopes and affections only that he seems to trample, for in social life no human being can be more gentle, patient, and unassuming than Maddalo. He is cheerful, frank, and witty. His more serious conversation is a sort of intoxication; men are held by it as by a spell. He has travelled much; and there is an inexpressible charm in his relation of his adventures in different countries.

Julian is an Englishman of good family, passionntely attached to those philosophical notions which assert the power of man over his own mind, and the immense improvements Edition: current; Page: [4] of which, by the extinction of certain moral superstitions, human society may be yet susceptible. Without concealing the evil in the world, he is for ever speculating how good may be made superior. He is a complete infidel, and a scoffer at all things reputed holy; and Maddalo takes a wicked pleasure in drawing out his taunts against religion. What Maddalo thinks on these matters is not exactly known. Julian, in spite of his heterodox opinions, is conjectured by his friends to possess some good qualities. How far this is possible, the pious reader will determine. Julian is rather serious.

Of the Maniac I can give no information. He seems by his own account to have been disappointed in love. He was evidently a very cultivated and amiable person when in his right senses. His story, told at length, might be like many other stories of the same kind: the unconnected exclamations of his agony will perhaps be found a sufficient comment for the text of every heart.

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I rode one evening with Count Maddalo

Upon the bank of land which breaks the flow

Of Adria towards Venice: a bare strand

Of hillocks, heaped from ever-shifting sand,

Matted with thistles and amphibious weeds,

Such as from earth’s embrace the salt ooze breeds,

Is this; an uninhabited sea-side,

Which the lone fisher, when his nets are dried,

Abandons; and no other object breaks

The waste, but one dwarf tree and some few stakes

Broken and unrepaired, and the tide makes

A narrow space of level sand thereon,

Where ’twas our wont to ride while day went down.

This ride was my delight. I love all waste

And solitary places; where we taste

The pleasure of believing what we see

Is boundless, as we wish our souls to be:

And such was this wide ocean, and this shore

More barren than its billows; and yet more

Than all, with a remembered friend I love

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To ride as then I rode;—for the winds drove

The living spray along the sunny air

Into our faces; the blue heavens were bare,

Stripped to their depths by the awakening north;

And, from the waves, sound like delight broke forth

Harmonising with solitude, and sent

Into our hearts aërial merriment.

So, as we rode, we talked; and the swift thought,

Winging itself with laughter, lingered not,

But flew from brain to brain,—such glee was ours,

Charged with light memories of remembered hours,

None slow enough for sadness: till we came

Homeward, which always makes the spirit tame.

This day had been cheerful but cold, and now

The sun was sinking, and the wind also.

Our talk grew somewhat serious, as may be

Talk interrupted with such raillery

As mocks itself, because it cannot scorn

The thoughts it would extinguish:—’twas forlorn,

Yet pleasing; such as once, so poets tell,

The devils held within the dales of hell,

Concerning God, freewill, and destiny.

Of all that Earth has been, or yet may be;

All that vain men imagine or believe,

Or hope can paint, or suffering can achieve,

We descanted; and I (for ever still

Is it not wise to make the best of ill?)

Argued against despondency; but pride

Made my companion take the darker side.

The sense that he was greater than his kind

Had struck, methinks, his eagle spirit blind

By gazing on its own exceeding light.

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Meanwhile the sun paused ere it should alight

Over the horizon of the mountains—Oh!

How beautiful is sunset, when the glow

Of heaven descends upon a land like thee,

Thou paradise of exiles, Italy!

Thy mountains, seas, and vineyards, and the towers

Of cities they encircle!—It was ours

To stand on thee, beholding it: and then,

Just where we had dismounted, the Count’s men

Were waiting for us with the gondola.

As those who pause on some delightful way,

Tho’ bent on pleasant pilgrimage, we stood,

Looking upon the evening and the flood,

Which lay between the city and the shore,

Paved with the image of the sky: the hoar

And aery Alps, towards the north, appeared,

Thro’ mist, an heaven-sustaining bulwark, reared

Between the east and west; and half the sky

Was roofed with clouds of rich emblazonry,

Dark purple at the zenith, which still grew

Down the steep west into a wondrous hue

Brighter than burning gold, even to the rent

Where the swift sun yet paused in his descent

Among the many folded hills—they were

Those famous Euganean hills, which bear,

As seen from Lido thro’ the harbour piles,

The likeness of a clump of peaked isles—

And then, as if the earth and sea had been

Dissolved into one lake of fire, were seen

Those mountains towering, as from waves of flame,

Around the vaporous sun, from which there came

The inmost purple spirit of light, and made

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Their very peaks transparent. “Ere it fade,”

Said my companion, “I will show you soon

A better station.” So, o’er the lagune

We glided; and from that funereal bark

I leaned, and saw the city, and could mark

How from their many isles, in evening’s gleam,

Its temples and its palaces did seem

Like fabrics of enchantment piled to heav’n.

I was about to speak, when—“We are even

Now at the point I meant,” said Maddalo,

And bade the gondolieri cease to row.

“Look, Julian, on the west, and listen well

If you hear not a deep and heavy bell.”

I looked, and saw between us and the sun

A building on an island, such an one

As age to age might add, for uses vile,—

A windowless, deformed and dreary pile;

And on the top an open tower, where hung

A bell, which in the radiance swayed and swung,

We could just hear its hoarse and iron tongue:

The broad sun sank behind it, and it tolled

In strong and black relief.—“What we behold

Shall be the madhouse and its belfry tower;”—

Said Maddalo, “and even at this hour,

Those who may cross the water hear that bell,

Which calls the maniacs, each one from his cell,

To vespers.”—“As much skill as need to pray,

In thanks or hope for their dark lot have they,

To their stern maker,” I replied.—“O, ho!

You talk as in years past,” said Maddalo.

“ ’Tis strange men change not. You were ever still

Among Christ’s flock a perilous infidel,

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A wolf for the meek lambs: if you can’t swim,

Beware of providence.” I looked on him,

But the gay smile had faded from his eye.

“And such,” he cried, “is our mortality;

And this must be the emblem and the sign

Of what should be eternal and divine;

And like that black and dreary bell the soul,

Hung in an heav’n-illumined tower, must toll

Our thoughts and our desires to meet below

Round the rent heart, and pray—as madmen do;

For what? they know not, till the night of death,

As sunset that strange vision, severeth

Our memory from itself, and us from all

We sought, and yet were baffled.” I recall

The sense of what he said, although I mar

The force of his expressions. The broad star

Of day meanwhile had sunk behind the hill;

And the black bell became invisible;

And the red tower looked grey; and all between,

The churches, ships, and palaces, were seen

Huddled in gloom; into the purple sea

The orange hues of heaven sunk silently.

We hardly spoke, and soon the gondola

Conveyed me to my lodging by the way.

The following morn was rainy, cold, and dim:

Ere Maddalo arose I called on him,

And whilst I waited, with his child I played;

A lovelier toy sweet Nature never made;

A serious, subtle, wild, yet gentle being;

Graceful without design, and unforeseeing;

With eyes—Oh! speak not of her eyes! which seem

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Twin mirrors of Italian Heaven, yet gleam

With such deep meaning as we never see

But in the human countenance. With me

She was a special favourite: I had nursed

Her fine and feeble limbs, when she came first

To this bleak world; and she yet seemed to know

On second sight, her ancient playfellow,

Less changed than she was by six months or so.

For, after her first shyness was worn out,

We sate there, rolling billiard balls about,

When the Count entered. Salutations past:

“The words you spoke last night might well have cast

A darkness on my spirit:—if man be

The passive thing you say, I should not see

Much harm in the religions and old saws,

(Though I may never own such leaden laws)

Which break a teachless nature to the yoke:

Mine is another faith.”—Thus much I spoke,

And, noting he replied not, added—“See

This lovely child; blithe, innocent and free;

She spends a happy time, with little care;

While we to such sick thoughts subjected are,

As came on you last night. It is our will

Which thus enchains us to permitted ill.

We might be otherwise; we might be all

We dream of, happy, high, majestical.

Where is the love, beauty, and truth we seek,

But in our minds? And, if we were not weak,

Should we be less in deed than in desire?”—

—“Aye, if we were not weak,—and we aspire,

How vainly! to be strong,” said Maddalo:

“You talk Utopia”—

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“It remains to know,”

I then rejoined, “and those who try, may find

How strong the chains are which our spirit bind:

Brittle perchance as straw. We are assured

Much may be conquered, much may be endured,

Of what degrades and crushes us. We know

That we have power over ourselves to do

And suffer—what, we know not till we try;

But something nobler than to live and die:

So taught the kings of old philosophy,

Who reigned before religion made men blind;

And those who suffer with their suffering kind,

Yet feel this faith, religion.”

“My dear friend,”

Said Maddalo, “my judgment will not bend

To your opinion, though I think you might

Make such a system refutation-tight,

As far as words go. I knew one like you,

Who to this city came some months ago,

With whom I argued in this sort,—and he

Is now gone mad—and so he answered me,

Poor fellow!—But if you would like to go,

We’ll visit him, and his wild talk will shew

How vain are such aspiring theories.”—

“I hope to prove the induction otherwise,

And that a want of that true theory still,

Which seeks a soul of goodness in things ill,

Or in himself or others, has thus bow’d

His being:—there are some by nature proud,

Who, patient in all else, demand but this—

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To love and be beloved with gentleness:—

And being scorned, what wonder if they die

Some living death? This is not destiny,

But man’s own wilful ill.”—

As thus I spoke,

Servants announced the gondola, and we

Through the fast-falling rain and high-wrought sea

Sailed to the island where the madhouse stands.

We disembarked. The clap of tortured hands,

Fierce yells, and howlings, and lamentings keen,

And laughter where complaint had merrier been,

Accosted us. We climbed the oozy stairs

Into an old court-yard. I heard on high,

Then, fragments of most touching melody,

But looking up saw not the singer there.—

Thro’ the black bars in the tempestuous air

I saw, like weeds on a wreck’d palace growing,

Long tangled locks flung wildly forth and flowing,

Of those who on a sudden were beguiled

Into strange silence, and looked forth and smiled,

Hearing sweet sounds. Then I:—

“Methinks there were

A cure of these with patience and kind care,

If music can thus move. But what is he,

Whom we seek here?”

“Of his sad history

I know but this,” said Maddalo: “he came

To Venice a dejected man, and fame

Said he was wealthy, or he had been so.

Some thought the loss of fortune wrought him woe;

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But he was ever talking in such sort

As you do,—but more sadly;—he seem’d hurt,

Even as a man with his peculiar wrong,

To hear but of the oppression of the strong,

Or those absurd deceits (I think with you

In some respects, you know) which carry thro’

The excellent impostors of this earth

When they outface detection. He had worth,

Poor fellow! but a humourist in his way.”—

—“Alas, what drove him mad!”

“I cannot say:

A lady came with him from France, and when

She left him and returned, he wander’d then

About yon lonely isles of desart sand,

Till he grew wild. He had no cash or land

Remaining:—the police had brought him here—

Some fancy took him, and he would not bear

Removal, so I fitted up for him

Those rooms beside the sea, to please his whim;

And sent him busts, and books, and urns for flowers,

Which had adorned his life in happier hours,

And instruments of music. You may guess

A stranger could do little more or less

For oneso gentle and unfortunate—

And those are his sweet strains which charm the weight

From madmen’s chains, and make this hell appear

A heaven of sacred silence, hushed to hear.”

“Nay, this was kind of you,—he had no claim,

As the world says.”

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“None but the very same

Which I on all mankind, were I, as he,

Fall’n to such deep reverse. His melody

Is interrupted now; we hear the din

Of madmen, shriek on shriek, again begin:

Let us now visit him: after this strain,

He ever communes with himself again,

And sees and hears not any.”

Having said

These words, we called the keeper, and he led

To an apartment opening on the sea.—

There the poor wretch was sitting mournfully

Near a piano, his pale fingers twined

One with the other; and the ooze and wind

Rushed thro’ an open casement, and did sway

His hair, and starred it with the brackish spray;

His head was leaning on a music book,

And he was muttering; and his lean limbs shook;

His lips were pressed against a folded leaf

In hue too beautiful for health, and grief

Smiled in their motions as they lay apart,

As one who wrought from his own fervid heart

The eloquence of passion: soon he raised

His sad meek face, and eyes lustrous and glazed,

And spoke,—sometimes as one who wrote, and thought

His words might move some heart that heeded not,

If sent to distant lands;—and then as one

Reproaching deeds never to be undone,

With wondering self-compassion;—then his speech

Was lost in grief, and then his words came each

Unmodulated and expressionless,—

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But that from one jarred accent you might guess

It was despair made them so uniform:

And all the while the loud and gusty storm

Hissed thro’ the window, and we stood behind,

Stealing his accents from the envious wind,

Unseen. I yet remember what he said

Distinctly, such impression his words made.

“Month after month,” he cried, “to bear this load,

And, as a jade urged by the whip and goad,

To drag life on—which like a heavy chain

Lengthens behind with many a link of pain,

And not to speak my grief—O, not to dare

To give a human voice to my despair;

But live, and move, and, wretched thing! smile on,

As if I never went aside to groan,

And wear this mask of falsehood even to those

Who are most dear—not for my own repose—

Alas! no scorn, or pain, or hate, could be

So heavy as that falsehood is to me—

But that I cannot bear more altered faces

Than needs must be, more changed and cold embraces,

More misery, disappointment, and mistrust

To own me for their father. Would the dust

Were covered in upon my body now!

That the life ceased to toil within my brow!

And then these thoughts would at the last be fled:

Let us not fear such pain can vex the dead.

“What Power delights to torture us? I know

That to myself I do not wholly owe

What now I suffer, though in part I may.

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Alas! none strewed fresh flowers upon the way

Where, wandering heedlessly, I met pale Pain,

My shadow, which will leave me not again.

If I have erred, there was no joy in error,

But pain, and insult, and unrest, and terror;

I have not, as some do, bought penitence

With pleasure, and a dark yet sweet offence;

For then if love, and tenderness, and truth

Had overlived Hope’s momentary youth,

My creed should have redeemed me from repenting;

But loathed scorn and outrage unrelenting

Met love excited by far other seeming

Until the end was gained:—as one from dreaming

Of sweetest peace, I woke, and found my state

Such as it is.—

“O, thou, my spirit’s mate!

Who, for thou art compassionate and wise,

Wouldst pity me from thy most gentle eyes

If this sad writing thou shouldst ever see,

My secret groans must be unheard by thee;

Thou wouldst weep tears, bitter as blood, to know

Thy lost friend’s incommunicable woe.

Ye few by whom my nature has been weighed

In friendship, let me not that name degrade,

By placing on your hearts the secret load

Which crushes mine to dust. There is one road

To peace, and that is truth, which follow ye!

Love sometimes leads astray to misery.

Yet think not, tho’ subdued (and I may well

Say that I am subdued)—that the full hell

Within me would infect the untainted breast

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Of sacred nature with its own unrest;

As some perverted beings think to find

In scorn or hate a medicine for the mind

Which scorn or hate hath wounded.—O, how vain!

The dagger heals not, but may rend again.

Believe that I am ever still the same

In creed as in resolve; and what may tame

My heart, must leave the understanding free,

Or all would sink under this agony.—

Nor dream that I will join the vulgar eye,

Or with my silence sanction tyranny,

Or seek a moment’s shelter from my pain

In any madness which the world calls gain;

Ambition, or revenge, or thoughts as stern

As those which make me what I am, or turn

To avarice or misanthrophy or lust.

Heap on me soon, O grave, thy welcome dust!

Till then the dungeon may demand its prey;

And Poverty and Shame may meet and say,

Halting beside me in the public way,—

‘That love-devoted youth is ours: let’s sit

Beside him: he may live some six months yet.’—

Or the red scaffold, as our country bends,

May ask some willing victim; or ye, friends!

May fall under some sorrow, which this heart

Or hand may share, or vanquish, or avert;

I am prepared, in truth, with no proud joy,

To do or suffer aught, as when a boy

I did devote to justice, and to love,

My nature, worthless now.

“I must remove

A veil from my pent mind. ’Tis torn aside!

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O! pallid as Death’s dedicated bride,

Thou mockery which art sitting by my side,

Am I not wan like thee? At the grave’s call

I haste, invited to thy wedding-ball,

To meet the ghastly paramour, for whom

Thou hast deserted me,—and made the tomb

Thy bridal bed. But I beside thy feet

Will lie, and watch ye from my winding-sheet

Thus—wide awake tho’ dead—Yet stay, O, stay!

Go not so soon—I know not what I say—

Hear but my reasons—I am mad, I fear,

My fancy is o’erwrought—thou art not here.

Pale art thou, ’tis most true—but thou art gone—

Thy work is finished; I am left alone.

* * * * * * *

“Nay, was it I who wooed thee to this breast,

Which like a serpent thou envenomest

As in repayment of the warmth it lent?

Didst thou not seek me for thine own content?

Did not thy love awaken mine? I thought

That thou wert she who said ‘You kiss me not

Ever; I fear you do not love me now.’

In truth I loved even to my overthrow

Her, who would fain forget these words; but they

Cling to her mind, and cannot pass away.

* * * * * * *

“You say that I am proud; that when I speak,

My lip is tortured with the wrongs, which break

The spirit it expresses.—Never one

Humbled himself before, as I have done!

Even the instinctive worm on which we tread

Turns, tho’ it wound not—then, with prostrate head,

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Sinks in the dust, and writhes like me—and dies:

—No:—wears a living death of agonies!

As the slow shadows of the pointed grass

Mark the eternal periods, its pangs pass,

Slow, ever-moving, making moments be

As mine seem,—each an immortality!

* * * * * * *

“That you had never seen me! never heard

My voice! and, more than all, had ne’er endured

The deep pollution of my loathed embrace!

That your eyes ne’er had lied love in my face!

That, like some maniac monk, I had torn out

The nerves of manhood by their bleeding root

With mine own quivering fingers! so that ne’er

Our hearts had for a moment mingled there,

To disunite in horror! These were not

With thee like some suppressed and hideous thought,

Which flits athwart our musings, but can find

No rest within a pure and gentle mind—

Thou sealed’st them with many a bare broad word,

And seard’st my memory o’er them,—for I heard

And can forget not—they were ministered,

One after one, those curses. Mix them up

Like self-destroying poisons in one cup;

And they will make one blessing, which thou ne’er

Didst imprecate for on me—death!

“It were

A cruel punishment for one most cruel,

If such can love, to make that love the fuel

Of the mind’s hell—hate, scorn, remorse, despair:

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But me, whose heart a stranger’s tear might wear,

As water-drops the sandy fountain stone;

Who loved and pitied all things, and could moan

For woes which others hear not, and could see

The absent with the glass of phantasy,

And near the poor and trampled sit and weep,

Following the captive to his dungeon deep;

Me, who am as a nerve o’er which do creep

The else-unfelt oppressions of this earth,

And was to thee the flame upon thy hearth,

When all beside was cold:—that thou on me

Shouldst rain these plagues of blistering agony—

Such curses are from lips once eloquent

With love’s too partial praise! Let none relent

Who intend deeds too dreadful for a name

Henceforth, if an example for the same

They seek:—for thou on me lookedst so and so,

And didst speak thus and thus. I live to shew

How much men bear and die not.

* * * * * * *

“Thou wilt tell,

With the grimace of hate, how horrible

It was to meet my love when thine grew less;

Thou wilt admire how I could e’er address

Such features to love’s work. . . . This taunt, tho’ true,

(For indeed nature nor in form nor hue

Bestowed on me her choicest workmanship)

Shall not be thy defence: for since thy life

Met mine first, years long past,—since thine eye kindled

With soft fire under mine,—I have not dwindled,

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Nor changed in mind, or body, or in aught

But as love changes what it loveth not

After long years and many trials.

* * * * * * *

“How vain

Are words! I thought never to speak again,

Not even in secret, not to my own heart—

But from my lips the unwilling accents start,

And from my pen the words flow as I write,

Dazzling my eyes with scalding tears—my sight

Is dim to see that charactered in vain,

On this unfeeling leaf, which burns the brain

And eats into it, blotting all things fair,

And wise and good, which time had written there.

Those who inflict must suffer, for they see

The work of their own hearts, and that must be

Our chastisement or recompense.—O, child!

I would that thine were like to be more mild

For both our wretched sakes,—for thine the most,

Who feel’st already all that thou hast lost,

Without the power to wish it thine again.

And, as slow years pass, a funereal train,

Each with the ghost of some lost hope or friend

Following it like its shadow, wilt thou bend

No thought on my dead memory?

* * * * * * *

“Alas, love!

Fear me not: against thee I’d not move

A finger in despite. Do I not live

That thou mayst have less bitter cause to grieve?

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I give thee tears for scorn, and love for hate;

And, that thy lot may be less desolate

Than his on whom thou tramplest, I refrain

From that sweet sleep which medicines all pain.

Then—when thou speakest of me—never say,

‘He could forgive not’—Here I cast away

All human passions, all revenge, all pride;

I think, speak, act no ill; I do but hide

Under these words, like embers, every spark

Of that which has consumed me. Quick and dark

The grave is yawning:—as its roof shall cover

My limbs with dust and worms, under and over;

So let oblivion hide this grief—The air

Closes upon my accents, as despair

Upon my heart—let death upon despair!”

He ceased, and overcome, leant back awhile;

Then rising, with a melancholy smile,

Went to a sopha, and lay down, and slept

A heavy sleep, and in his dreams he wept,

And muttered some familiar name, and we

Wept without shame in his society.

I think I never was impress’d so much;

The man who were not, must have lack’d a touch

Of human nature.—Then we linger’d not,

Although our argument was quite forgot;

But, calling the attendants, went to dine

At Maddalo’s:—yet neither cheer nor wine

Could give us spirits, for we talked of him,

And nothing else, till daylight made stars dim.

And we agreed it was some dreadful ill

Wrought on him boldly, yet unspeakable,

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By a dear friend; some deadly change in love

Of one vow’d deeply which he dreamed not of;

For whose sake he, it seemed, had fixed a blot

Of falsehood in his mind, which flourish’d not

But in the light of all-beholding truth;

And having stamped this canker on his youth,

She had abandoned him:—and how much more

Might be his woe, we guessed not:—he had store

Of friends and fortune once, as we could guess

From his nice habits and his gentleness:

These now were lost—it were a grief indeed

If he had changed one unsustaining reed

For all that such a man might else adorn.

The colours of his mind seemed yet unworn;

For the wild language of his grief was high—

Such as in measure were called poetry.

And I remember one remark, which then

Maddalo made: he said—“Most wretched men

Are cradled into poetry by wrong:

They learn in suffering what they teach in song.”

If I had been an unconnected man,

I, from this moment, should have form’d some plan

Never to leave sweet Venice: for to me

It was delight to ride by the lone sea:

And then the town is silent—one may write,

Or read in gondolas by day or night,

Having the little brazen lamp alight,

Unseen, uninterrupted:—books are there,

Pictures, and casts from all those statues fair

Which were twin-born with poetry—and all

We seek in towns, with little to recal

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Regret for the green country:—I might sit

In Maddalo’s great palace, and his wit

And subtle talk would cheer the winter night,

And make me know myself:—and the fire light

Would flash upon our faces, till the day

Might dawn, and make me wonder at my stay.

But I had friends in London too. The chief

Attraction here was that I sought relief

From the deep tenderness that maniac wrought

Within me—’twas perhaps an idle thought,

But I imagined that if, day by day,

I watched him, and seldom went away,

And studied all the beatings of his heart

With zeal, as men study some stubborn art

For their own good, and could by patience find

An entrance to the caverns of his mind,

I might reclaim him from his dark estate.

In friendships I had been most fortunate,

Yet never saw I one whom I would call

More willingly my friend;—and this was all

Accomplish’d not;—such dreams of baseless good

Oft come and go, in crowds or solitude,

And leave no trace!—but what I now design’d,

Made, for long years, impression on my mind.

—The following morning, urged by my affairs,

I left bright Venice.—

After many years,

And many changes, I returned; the name

Of Venice, and its aspect, was the same;

But Maddalo was travelling, far away,

Among the mountains of Armenia.

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His dog was dead: his child had now become

A woman, such as it has been my doom

To meet with few; a wonder of this earth,

Where there is little of transcendent worth,—

Like one of Shakspeare’s women. Kindly she,

And with a manner beyond courtesy,

Receiv’d her father’s friend; and, when I ask’d

Of the lorn maniac, she her memory task’d,

And told, as she had heard, the mournful tale:

“That the poor sufferer’s health began to fail,

Two years from my departure; but that then

The lady, who had left him, came again.

Her mien had been imperious, but she now

Look’d meek; perhaps remorse had brought her low.

Her coming made him better; and they stayed

Together at my father’s,—for I played,

As I remember, with the lady’s shawl;

I might be six years old:—But, after all,

She left him.”—

“Why, her heart must have been tough;

How did it end?”

“And was not this enough?

They met, they parted.”

“Child, is there no more?”

“Something within that interval, which bore

The stamp of why they parted, how they met;—

Yet if thine aged eyes disdain to wet

Those wrinkled cheeks with youth’s remember’d tears,

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Ask me no more; but let the silent years

Be clos’d and cered over their memory,

As yon mute marble where their corpses lie.”

I urged and questioned still: she told me how

All happen’d—but the cold world shall not know.

Rome

,

May, 1819

.

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THE WITCH OF ATLAS.

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I.

Before those cruel Twins, whom at one birth

Incestuous Change bore to her father Time,

Error and Truth, bad hunted from the earth

All those bright natures which adorned its prime,

And left us nothing to believe in, worth

The pains of putting into learned rhyme,

A lady-witch there lived on Atlas’ mountain

Within a cavern by a secret fountain.

II.

Her mother was one of the Atlantides:

The all-beholding Sun had ne’er beholden

In his wide voyage o’er continents and seas

So fair a creature, as she lay enfolden

In the warm shadow of her loveliness;—

He kissed her with his beams, and made all golden

The chamber of grey rock in which she lay—

She, in that dream of joy, dissolved away.

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III.

’Tis said, she was first changed into a vapour,

And then into a cloud, such clouds as flit,

Like splendour-winged moths about a taper,

Round the red west when the sun dies in it:

And then into a meteor, such as caper

On hill-tops when the moon is in a fit;

Then, into one of those mysterious stars

Which hide themselves between the Earth and Mars.

IV.

Ten times the Mother of the Months had bent

Her bow beside the folding-star, and bidden

With that bright sign the billows to indent

The sea-deserted sand: like children chidden,

At her command they ever came and went:—

Since in that cave a dewy splendour hidden,

Took shape and motion: with the living form

Of this embodied Power, the cave grew warm.

V.

A lovely lady garmented in light

From her own beauty—deep her eyes, as are

Two openings of unfathomable night

Seen through a tempest’s cloven roof—her hair

Dark—the dim brain whirls dizzy with delight,

Picturing her form; her soft smiles shone afar,

And her low voice was heard like love, and drew

All living things towards this wonder new.

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VI.

And first the spotted cameleopard came,

And then the wise and fearless elephant;

Then the sly serpent, in the golden flame

Of his own volumes intervolved;—all gaunt

And sanguine beasts her gentle looks made tame.

They drank before her at her sacred fount;

And every beast of beating heart grew bold,

Such gentleness and power even to behold.

VII.

The brinded lioness led forth her young,

That she might teach them how they should forego

Their inborn thirst of death; the pard unstrung

His sinews at her feet, and sought to know

With looks whose motions spoke without a tongue

How he might be as gentle as the doe.

The magic circle of her voice and eyes

All savage natures did imparadise.

VIII.

And old Silenus, shaking a green stick

Of lilies, and the wood-gods in a crew

Came, blithe, as in the olive copses thick

Cicadæ are, drunk with the noonday dew:

And Driope and Faunus followed quick,

Teazing the God to sing them something new,

Till in this cave they found the lady lone,

Sitting upon a seat of emerald stone.

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IX.

And Universal Pan, ’tis said, was there,

And though none saw him,—through the adamant

Of the deep mountains, through the trackless air,

And through those living spirits, like a want

He past out of his everlasting lair

Where the quick heart of the great world doth pant,

And felt that wondrous lady all alone,—

And she felt him, upon her emerald throne.

X.

And every nymph of stream and spreading tree,

And every shepherdess of Ocean’s flocks,

Who drives her white waves over the green sea;

And Ocean, with the brine on his grey locks,

And quaint Priapus with his company

All came, much wondering how the enwombed rocks

Could have brought forth so beautiful a birth;—

Her love subdued their wonder and their mirth.

XI.

The herdsmen and the mountain maidens came,

And the rude kings of pastoral Garamant—

These spirits shook within them, as a flame

Stirred by the air under a cavern gaunt:

Pigmies, and Polyphemes, by many a name,

Centaurs and Satyrs, and such shapes as haunt

Wet clefts,—and lumps neither alive nor dead,

Dog-headed, bosom-eyed and bird-footed.

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XII.

For she was beautiful: her beauty made

The bright world dim, and every thing beside

Seemed like the fleeting image of a shade:

No thought of living spirit could abide,

Which to her looks had ever been betrayed,

On any object in the world so wide,

On any hope within the circling skies,

But on her form, and in her inmost eyes.

XIII.

Which when the lady knew, she took her spindle

And twined three threads of fleecy mist, and three

Long lines of light, such as the dawn may kindle

The clouds and waves and mountains with, and she

As many star-beams, ere their lamps could dwindle

In the belated moon, wound skilfully;

And with these threads a subtle veil she wove—

A shadow for the splendour of her love.

XIV.

The deep recesses of her odorous dwelling

Were stored with magic treasures—sounds of air,

Which had the power all spirits of compelling,

Folded in cells of chrystal silence there;

Such as we hear in youth, and think the feeling

Will never die—yet ere we are aware,

The feeling and the sound are fled and gone,

And the regret they leave remains alone.

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XV.

And there lay Visions swift, and sweet, and quaint,

Each in its thin sheath like a chrysalis;

Some eager to burst forth, some weak and faint

With the soft burthen of intensest bliss;

It is its work to bear to many a saint

Whose heart adores the shrine which holiest is,

Even Love’s—and others white, green, grey and black,

And of all shapes—and each was at her beck.

XVI.

And odours in a kind of aviary

Of ever-blooming Eden-trees she kept,

Clipt in a floating net, a love-sick Fairy

Had woven from dew-beams while the moon yet slept;

As bats at the wired window of a dairy,

They beat their vans; and each was an adept,

When loosed and missioned, making wings of winds,

To stir sweet thoughts or sad in destined minds.

XVII.

And liquors clear and sweet, whose healthful might

Could medicine the sick soul to happy sleep,

And change eternal death into a night

Of glorious dreams—or if eyes needs must weep,

Could make their tears all wonder and delight,

She in her chrystal vials did closely keep:

If men could drink of those clear vials, ’tis said

The living were not envied of the dead.

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XVIII.

Her cave was stored with scrolls of strange device,

The works of some Saturnian Archimage,

Which taught the expiations at whose price

Men from the Gods might win that happy age

Too lightly lost, redeeming native vice;

And which might quench the earth-consuming rage

Of gold and blood—till men should live and move

Harmonious as the sacred stars above.

XIX.

And how all things that seem untameable,

Not to be checked and not to be confined,

Obey the spells of wisdom’s wizard skill;

Time, Earth and Fire—the Ocean and the Wind,

And all their shapes—and man’s imperial will;

And other scrolls whose writings did unbind

The inmost lore of Love—let the prophane

Tremble to ask what secrets they contain.

XX.

And wondrous works of substances unknown,

To which the enchantment of her father’s power

Had changed those ragged blocks of savage stone,

Were heaped in the recesses of her bower;

Carved lamps and chalices, and phials which shone

In their own golden beams—each like a flower,

Out of whose depth a fire-fly shakes his light

Under a cypress in a starless night.

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XXI.

At first she lived alone in this wild home,

And her own thoughts were each a minister,

Clothing themselves or with the ocean-foam,

Or with the wind, or with the speed of fire,

To work whatever purposes might come

Into her mind; such power her mighty Sire

Had girt them with, whether to fly or run,

Through all the regions which he shines upon.

XXII.

The Ocean-nymphs and Hamadryades,

Oreads and Naiads with long weedy locks,

Offered to do her bidding through the seas,

Under the earth, and in the hollow rocks,

And far beneath the matted roots of trees,

And in the gnarled heart of stubborn oaks,

So they might live forever in the light

Of her sweet presence—each a satellite.

XXIII.

“This may not be,” the wizard maid replied;

“The fountains where the Naiades bedew

Their shining hair, at length are drained and dried;

The solid oaks forget their strength, and strew

Their latest leaf upon the mountains wide;

The boundless ocean, like a drop of dew

Will be consumed—the stubborn centre must

Be scattered, like a cloud of summer dust.

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XXIV.

“And ye with them will perish one by one:

If I must sigh to think that this shall be,

If I must weep when the surviving Sun

Shall smile on your decay—Oh, ask not me

To love you till your little race is run;

I cannot die as ye must—over me

Your leaves shall glance—the streams in which ye dwell

Shall be my paths henceforth, and so, farewell!”

XXV.

She spoke and wept: the dark and azure well

Sparkled beneath the shower of her bright tears,

And every little circlet where they fell,

Flung to the cavern-roof inconstant spheres

And intertangled lines of light:—a knell

Of sobbing voices came upon her ears

From those departing Forms, o’er the serene

Of the white streams and of the forest green.

XXVI.

All day the wizard lady sat aloof

Spelling out scrolls of dread antiquity

Under the cavern’s fountain-lighted roof;

Or broidering the pictured poesy

Of some high tale upon her growing woof,

Which the sweet splendour of her smiles could dye

In hues outshining heaven—and ever she

Added some grace to the wrought poesy.

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XXVII.

While on her hearth lay blazing many a piece

Of sandal wood, rare gums and cinnamon;

Men scarcely know how beautiful fire is,

Each flame of it is as a precious stone

Dissolved in ever moving light, and this

Belongs to each and all who gaze upon.

The Witch beheld it not, for in her hand

She held a woof that dimmed the burning brand.

XXVIII.

This lady never slept, but lay in trance

All night within the fountain—as in sleep.

Its emerald crags glowed in her beauty’s glance:

Through the green splendour of the water deep

She saw the constellations reel and dance

Like fire-flies—and withal did ever keep

The tenour of her contemplations calm,

With open eyes, closed feet and folded palm.

XXIX.

And when the whirlwinds and the clouds descended

From the white pinnacles of that cold hill,

She past at dewfall to a space extended,

Where in a lawn of flowering asphodel

Amid a wood of pines and cedars blended,

There yawned an inextinguishable well

Of crimson fire, full even to the brim

And overflowing all the margin trim.

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XXX.

Within the which she lay when the fierce war

Of wintry winds shook that innocuous liquor

In many a mimic moon and bearded star,

O’er woods and lawns—the serpent heard it flicker

In sleep, and dreaming still, he crept afar—

And when the windless snow descended thicker

Than autumn leaves, she watched it as it came

Melt on the surface of the level flame.

XXXI.

She had a Boat which some say Vulcan wrought

For Venus, as the chariot of her star;

But it was found too feeble to be fraught

With all the ardours in that sphere which are,

And so she sold it, and Apollo bought,

And gave it to this daughter: from a car

Changed to the fairest and the lightest boat

Which ever upon mortal stream did float.

XXXII.

And others say, that when but three hours old,

The first-born Love out of his cradle leapt,

And clove dun Chaos with his wings of gold,

And like an horticultural adept,

Stole a strange seed, and wrapt it up in mould,

And sowed it in his mother’s star, and kept

Watering it all the summer with sweet dew,

And with his wings fanning it as it grew.

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XXXIII.

The plant grew strong and green—the snowy flower

Fell, and the long and gourd-like fruit began

To turn the light and dew by inward power

To its own substance; woven tracery ran

Of light firm texture, ribbed and branching, o’er

The solid rind, like a leaf’s veined fan,

Of which Love scooped this boat, and with soft motion

Piloted it round the circumfluous ocean.

XXXIV.

This boat she moored upon her fount, and lit

A living spirit within all its frame,

Breathing the soul of swiftness into it.

Couched on the fountain like a panther tame,

One of the twain at Evan’s feet that sit;

Or as on Vesta’s sceptre a swift flame,

Or on blind Homer’s heart a winged thought,—

In joyous expectation lay the boat.

XXXV.

Then by strange art she kneaded fire and snow

Together, tempering the repugnant mass

With liquid love—all things together grow

Through which the harmony of love can pass;

And a fair Shape out of her hands did flow

A living Image, which did far surpass

In beauty that bright shape of vital stone

Which drew the heart out of Pygmalion.

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XXXVI.

A sexless thing it was, and in its growth

It seemed to have developed no defect

Of either sex, yet all the grace of both,—

In gentleness and strength its limbs were decked;

The bosom swelled lightly with its full youth,

The countenance was such as might select

Some artist that his skill should never die,

Imaging forth such perfect purity.

XXXVII.

From its smooth shoulders hung two rapid wings,

Fit to have borne it to the seventh sphere,

Tipt with the speed of liquid lightnings,

Dyed in the ardours of the atmosphere:

She led her creature to the boiling springs

Where the light boat was moored,—and said—“Sit here!”

And pointed to the prow, and took her seat

Beside the rudder with opposing feet.

XXXVIII.

And down the streams which clove those mountains vast

Around their inland islets, and amid

The panther-peopled forests, whose shade cast

Darkness and odours, and a pleasure hid

In melancholy gloom, the pinnace past;

By many a star-surrounded pyramid

Of icy crag cleaving the purple sky,

And caverns yawning round unfathomably.

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XXXIX.

The silver noon into that winding dell,

With slanted gleam athwart the forest tops,

Tempered like golden evening, feebly fell;

A green and glowing light, like that which drops

From folded lilies in which glowworms dwell,

When earth over her face night’s mantle wraps;

Between the severed mountains lay on high

Over the stream, a narrow rift of sky.

XL.

And ever as she went, the Image lay

With folded wings and unawakened eyes;

And o’er its gentle countenance did play

The busy dreams, as thick as summer flies,

Chasing the rapid smiles that would not stay,

And drinking the warm tears, and the sweet sighs

Inhaling, which, with busy murmur vain,

They had aroused from that full heart and brain.

XLI.

And ever down the prone vale, like a cloud

Upon a stream of wind, the pinnace went:

Now lingering on the pools, in which abode

The calm and darkness of the deep content

In which they paused; now o’er the shallow road

Of white and dancing waters all besprent

With sand and polished pebbles:—mortal boat

In such a shallow rapid could not float.

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XLII.

And down the earthquaking cataracts which shiver

Their snow-like waters into golden air,

Or under chasms unfathomable ever

Sepulchre them, till in their rage they tear

A subterranean portal for the river,

It fled—the circling sunbows did upbear

Its fall down the hoar precipice of spray,

Lighting it far upon its lampless way.

XLIII.

And when the wizard lady would ascend

The labyrinths of some many winding vale,

Which to the inmost mountain upward tend—

She called “Hermaphroditus!” and the pale

And heavy hue which slumber could extend

Over its lips and eyes, as on the gale

A rapid shadow from a slope of grass,

Into the darkness of the stream did pass.

XLIV.

And it unfurled its heaven-coloured pinions,

With stars of fire spotting the stream below;

And from above into the Sun’s dominions

Flinging a glory, like the golden glow

In which spring clothes her emerald-winged minions,

All interwoven with fine feathery snow

And moonlight splendour of intensest rime,

With which frost paints the pines in winter time.

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XLV.

And then it winnowed the Elysian air

Which ever hung about that lady bright,

With its ethereal vans—and speeding there,

Like a star up the torrent of the night,

Or a swift eagle in the morning glare

Breasting the whirlwind with impetuous flight;

The pinnace, oared by those enchanted wings,

Clove the fierce streams towards their upper springs.

XLVI.

The water flashed like sunlight, by the prow

Of a noon-wandering meteor flung to Heaven;

The still air seemed as if its waves did flow

In tempest down the mountains,—loosely driven

The lady’s radiant hair streamed to and fro:

Beneath, the billows having vainly striven

Indignant and impetuous, roared to feel

The swift and steady motion of the keel.

XLVII.

Or, when the weary moon was in the wane,

Or in the noon of interlunar night,

The lady-witch in visions could not chain

Her spirit; but sailed forth under the light

Of shooting stars, and bade extend amain

His storm-outspeeding wings, th’ Hermaphrodite;

She to the Austral waters took her way,

Beyond the fabulous Thamondocona.

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XLVIII.

Where, like a meadow which no scythe has shaven,

Which rain could never bend, or whirl-blast shake

With the Antarctic constellations haven,

Canopus and his crew, lay th’ Austral lake—

There she would build herself a windless haven

Out of the clouds whose moving turrets make

The bastions of the storm, when through the sky

The spirits of the tempest thundered by.

XLIX.

A haven, beneath whose translucent floor

The tremulous stars sparkled unfathomably,

And around which, the solid vapours hoar,

Based on the level waters, to the sky

Lifted their dreadful crags; and like a shore

Of wintry mountains, inaccessibly

Hemmed in with rifts and precipices grey,

And hanging crags, many a cove and bay.

L.

And whilst the outer lake beneath the lash

Of the winds’ scourge, foamed like a wounded thing;

And the incessant hail with stony clash

Ploughed up the waters, and the flagging wing

Of the roused cormorant in the lightning flash

Looked like the wreck of some wind-wandering

Fragment of inky thundersmoke—this haven

Was as a gem to copy Heaven engraven.

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LI.

On which that lady played her many pranks,

Circling the image of a shooting star,

Even as a tyger on Hydaspes’ banks

Outspeeds the Antelopes which speediest are,

In her light boat; and many quips and cranks

She played upon the water; till the car

Of the late moon, like a sick matron wan,

To journey from the misty east began.

LII.

And then she called out of the hollow turrets

Of those high clouds, white, golden and vermilion,

The armies of her ministering spirits—

In mighty legions million after million

They came, each troop emblazoning its merits

On meteor flags; and many a proud pavilion,

Of the intertexture of the atmosphere,

They pitched upon the plain of the calm mere.

LIII.

They framed the imperial tent of their great Queen

Of woven exhalations, underlaid

With lambent lightning-fire, as may be seen

A dome of thin and open ivory inlaid

With crimson silk—cressets from the serene

Hung there, and on the water for her tread,

A tapestry of fleece-like mist was strewn,

Dyed in the beams of the ascending moon.

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LIV.

And on a throne o’erlaid with starlight, caught

Upon those wandering isles of aëry dew,

Which highest shoals of mountain shipwreck not,

She sate, and heard all that had happened new

Between the earth and moon since they had brought

The last intelligence—and now she grew

Pale as that moon, lost in the watery night—

And now she wept, and now she laughed outright.

LV.

These were tame pleasures.—She would often climb

The steepest ladder of the crudded rack

Up to some beaked cape of cloud sublime,

And like Arion on the dolphin’s back

Ride singing through the shoreless air. Oft time

Following the serpent lightning’s winding track,

She ran upon the platforms of the wind,

And laughed to hear the fire-balls roar behind.

LVI.

And sometimes to those streams of upper air,

Which whirl the earth in its diurnal round,

She would ascend, and win the spirits there

To let her join their chorus. Mortals found

That on those days the sky was calm and fair,

And mystic snatches of harmonious sound

Wandered upon the earth where’er she past,

And happy thoughts of hope, too sweet to last.

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LVII.

But her choice sport was, in the hours of sleep,

To glide adown old Nilus, when he threads

Egypt and Æthiopia, from the steep

Of utmost Axumè, until he spreads,

Like a calm flock of silver-fleeced sheep,

His waters on the plain: and crested heads

Of cities and proud temples gleam amid

And many a vapour-belted pyramid.

LVIII.

By Mæris and the Mareotid lakes,

Strewn with faint blooms like bridal chamber floors;

Where naked boys bridling tame water-snakes,

Or charioteering ghastly alligators,

Had left on the sweet waters mighty wakes

Of those huge forms:—within the brazen doors

Of the great Labyrinth slept both boy and beast,

Tired with the pomp of their Osirian feast.

LIX.

And where within the surface of the river

The shadows of the massy temples lie,

And never are erased—but tremble ever

Like things which every cloud can doom to die,

Through lotus-pav’n canals, and wheresoever

The works of man pierced that serenest sky

With tombs, and towers, and fanes, ’twas her delight

To wander in the shadow of the night.

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LX.

With motion like the spirit of that wind

Whose soft step deepens slumber, her light feet

Past through the peopled haunts of human kind,

Scattering sweet visions from her presence sweet,

Through fane and palace-court and labyrinth mined

With many a dark and subterranean street

Under the Nile; through chambers high and deep

She past, observing mortals in their sleep.

LXI.

A pleasure sweet doubtless it was to see

Mortals subdued in all the shapes of sleep.

Here lay two sister-twins in infancy;

There, a lone youth who in his dreams did weep;

Within, two lovers linked innocently

In their loose locks which over both did creep

Like ivy from one stem;—and there lay calm,

Old age with snow-bright hair and folded palm.

LXII.

But other troubled forms of sleep she saw,

Not to be mirrored in a holy song,

Distortions foul of supernatural awe,

And pale imaginings of visioned wrong,

And all the code of custom’s lawless law

Written upon the brows of old and young:

“This,” said the wizard maiden, “is the strife,

Which stirs the liquid surface of man’s life.”

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LXIII.

And little did the sight disturb her soul—

We, the weak mariners of that wide lake

Where’er its shores extend or billows roll,

Our course unpiloted and starless make

O’er its wild surface to an unknown goal—

But she in the calm depths her way could take,

Where in bright bowers immortal forms abide,

Beneath the weltering of the restless tide.

LXIV.

And she saw princes couched under the glow

Of sunlike gems; and round each temple-court

In dormitories ranged, row after row,

She saw the priests asleep,—all of one sort,

For all were educated to be so.—

The peasants in their huts, and in the port

The sailors she saw cradled on the waves,

And the dead lulled within their dreamless graves.

LXV.

And all the forms in which those spirits lay,

Were to her sight like the diaphanous

Veils, in which those sweet ladies oft array

Their delicate limbs, who would conceal from us

Only their scorn of all concealment: they

Move in the light of their own beauty thus.

But these, and all now lay with sleep upon them,

And little thought a Witch was looking on them.

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LXVI.

She all those human figures breathing there

Beheld as living spirits—to her eyes

The naked beauty of the soul lay bare,

And often through a rude and worn disguise

She saw the inner form most bright and fair—

And then,—she had a charm of strange device,

Which murmured on mute lips with tender tone,

Could make that spirit mingle with her own.

LXVII.

Alas, Aurora! what wouldst thou have given

For such a charm, when Tithon became grey?

Or how much, Venus, of thy silver Heaven

Wouldst thou have yielded, ere Proserpina

Had half (oh! why not all?) the debt forgiven

Which dear Adonis had been doomed to pay,

To any witch who would have taught you it?

The Heliad doth not know its value yet.

LXVIII.

’Tis said in after times her spirit free

Knew what love was, and felt itself alone—

But holy Dian could not chaster be

Before she stooped to kiss Endymion,

Than now this lady—like a sexless bee

Tasting all blossoms, and confined to none—

Among those mortal forms, the wizard-maiden

Passed with an eye serene and heart unladen.

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LXIX.

To those she saw most beautiful, she gave

Strange panacea in a chrystal bowl.

They drank in their deep sleep of that sweet wave,

And lived thenceforth as if some controul

Mightier than life, were in them; and the grave

Of such, when death oppressed the weary soul,

Was as a green and overarching bower

Lit by the gems of many a starry flower.

LXX.

For on the night that they were buried, she

Restored the embalmers ruining, and shook

The light out of the funeral lamps, to be

A mimic day within that deathy nook;

And she unwound the woven imagery

Of second childhood’s swaddling bands, and took

The coffin, its last cradle, from its niche,

And threw it with contempt into a ditch.

LXXI.

And there the body lay, age after age,

Mute, breathing, beating, warm, and undecaying

Like one asleep in a green hermitage,

With gentle sleep about its eyelids playing,

And living in its dreams beyond the rage

Of death or life; while they were still arraying

In liveries ever new, the rapid, blind

And fleeting generations of mankind.

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LXXII.

And she would write strange dreams upon the brain

Of those who were less beautiful, and make

All harsh and crooked purposes more vain

Than in the desart is the serpent’s wake

Which the sand covers,—all his evil gain

The miser in such dreams would rise and shake

Into a beggar’s lap;—the lying scribe

Would his own lies betray without a bribe.

LXXIII.

The priests would write an explanation full,

Translating hieroglyphies into Greek,

How the god Apis, really was a bull,

And nothing more; and bid the herald stick

The same against the temple doors, and pull

The old cant down; they licensed all to speak

Whate’er they thought of hawks, and cats, and geese,

By pastoral letters to each diocese.

LXXIV.

The king would dress an ape up in his crown

And robes, and seat him on his glorious seat,

And on the right hand of the sunlike throne

Would place a gaudy mock-bird to repeat

The chatterings of the monkey.—Every one

Of the prone courtiers crawled to kiss the feet

Of their great Emperor when the morning came;

And kissed—alas, how many kiss the same!

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LXXV.

The soldiers dreamed that they were blacksmiths, and

Walked out of quarters in somnambulism,

Round the red anvils you might see them stand

Like Cyclopses in Vulcan’s sooty abysm,

Beating their swords to ploughshares;—in a band

The jailors sent those of the liberal schism

Free through the streets of Memphis; much, I wis,

To the annoyance of king Amasis.

LXXVI.

And timid lovers who had been so coy,

They hardly knew whether they loved or not,

Would rise out of their rest, and take sweet joy,

To the fulfilment of their inmost thought;

And when next day the maiden and the boy

Met one another, both, like sinners caught,

Blushed at the thing which each believed was done

Only in fancy—till the tenth moon shone;

LXXVII.

And then the Witch would let them take no ill:

Of many thousand schemes which lovers find

The Witch found one,—and so they took their fill

Of happiness in marriage warm and kind.

Friends who by practice of some envious skill,

Were torn apart, a wide wound, mind from mind!

She did unite again with visions clear

Of deep affection and of truth sincere.

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LXXVIII.

These were the pranks she played among the cities

Of mortal men, and what she did to sprites

And Gods, entangling them in her sweet ditties

To do her will, and shew their subtle slights,

I will declare another time; for it is

A tale more fit for the weïrd winter nights—

Than for these garish summer days, when we

Scarcely believe much more than we can see.

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LETTER TO —

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Leghorn

,

July 1, 1820

.

The spider spreads her webs, whether she be

In poet’s tower, cellar, or barn, or tree;

The silkworm in the dark green mulberry leaves

His winding sheet and cradle ever weaves;

So I, a thing whom moralists call worm,

Sit spinning still round this decaying form,

From the fine threads of rare and subtle thought—

No net of words in garish colours wrought

To catch the idle buzzers of the day—

But a soft cell, where when that fades away,

Memory may clothe in wings my living name

And feed it with the asphodels of fame,

Which in those hearts which most remember me

Grow, making love an immortality.

Whoever should behold me now, I wist,

Would think I were a mighty mechanist,

Bent with sublime Archimedean art

To breathe a soul into the iron lieart

Of some machine portentous, or strange gin,

Which by the force of figured spells might win

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Its way over the sea, and sport therein;

For round the walls are hung dread engines, such

As Vulcan never wrought for Jove to clutch

Ixion or the Titan:—or the quick

Wit of that man of God, St. Dominic,

To convince Atheist, Turk, or Heretic;

Or those in philosophic councils met,

Who thought to pay some interest for the debt

They owed * * * * * *

By giving a faint foretaste of damnation

To Shakespear, Sidney, Spenser and the rest

Who made our land an island of the blest,

When lamp-like Spain, who now relumes her fire

On Freedom’s hearth, grew dim with Empire:—

With thumbscrews, wheels, with tooth and spike and jag,

Which fishes found under the utmost crag

Of Cornwall and the storm-encompassed isles,

Where to the sky the rude sea seldom smiles

Unless in treacherous wrath, as on the morn

When the exulting elements in scorn

Satiated with destroyed destruction, lay

Sleeping in beauty on their mangled prey,

As panthers sleep:—and other strange and dread

Magical forms the brick floor overspread—

Proteus transformed to metal did not make

More figures, or more strange; nor did he take

Such shapes of unintelligible brass,

Or heap himself in such a horrid mass

Of tin and iron not to be understood,

And forms of unimaginable wood,

To puzzle Tubal Cain and all his brood:

Great screws, and cones, and wheels, and grooved blocks,

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The elements of what will stand the shocks

Of wave and wind and time.—Upon the table

More knacks and quips there be than I am able

To catalogize in this verse of mine:—

A pretty bowl of wood—not full of wine,

But quicksilver; that dew which the gnomes drink

When at their subterranean toil they swink,

Pledging the demons of the earthquake, who

Reply to them in lava-cry, halloo!

And call out to the cities o’er their head,—

Roofs, towns and shrines,—the dying and the dead

Crash through the chinks of earth—and then all quaff

Another rouse, and hold their sides and laugh.

This quicksilver no gnome has drunk—within

The walnut bowl it lies, veined and thin,

In colour like the wake of light that stains

The Tuscan deep, when from the moist moon rains

The inmost shower of it’s white fire—the breeze

Is still—blue heaven smiles over the pale seas.

And in this bowl of quicksilver—for I

Yield to the impulse of an infancy

Outlasting manhood—I have made to float

A rude idealism of a paper boat—

A hollow screw with cogs—Henry will know

The thing I mean and laugh at me,—if so

He fears not I should do more mischief.—Next

Lie bills and calculations much perplext,

With steam-boats, frigates, and machinery quaint

Traced over them in blue and yellow paint.

Then comes a range of mathematical

Instruments, for plans nautical and statical,

A heap of rosin, a green broken glass

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With ink in it;—a china cup that was

What it will never be again, I think,

A thing from which sweet lips were wont to drink

The liquor doctors rail at—and which I

Will quaff in spite of them—and when we die

We’ll toss up who died first of drinking tea,

And cry out,—heads or tails? where’er we be.

Near that a dusty paint box, some old hooks,

An half-burnt match, an ivory block, three books,

Where conic sections, spherics, logarithms,

To great Laplace, from Saunderson and Sims,

Lie heaped in their harmonious disarray

Of figures,—disentangle them who may.

Baron de Tott’s memoirs beside them lie,

And some odd volumes of old chemistry.

Near them a most inexplicable thing,

With least in the middle—I’m conjecturing

How to make Henry understand;—but—no,

I’ll leave, as Spenser says, with many mo,

This secret in the pregnant womb of time,

Too vast a matter for so weak a rhyme.

And here like some weïrd Archimage sit I,

Plotting dark spells, and devilish enginery,

The self-impelling steam-wheels of the mind

Which pump up oaths from clergymen, and grind

The gentle spirit of our meek reviews

Into a powdery foam of salt abuse,

Ruffling the ocean of their self content;—

I sit—and smile or sigh as is my bent,

But not for them—Libeccio rushes round

With an inconstant and an idle sound,

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I heed him more than them—the thunder-smoke

Is gathering on the mountains, like a cloak

Folded athwart their shoulders broad and bare;

The ripe corn under the undulating air

Undulates like an ocean;—and the vines

Are trembling wide in all their trelliced lines—

The murmur of the awakening sea doth fill

The empty pauses of the blast;—the hill

Looks hoary through the white electric rain,

And from the glens beyond, in sullen strain

The interrupted thunder howls; above

One chasm of heaven smiles, like the age of love

On the unquiet world;—while such things are,

How could one worth your friendship heed the war

Of worms? The shriek of the world’s carrion jays,

Their censure, or their wonder, or their praise?

You are not here! the quaint witch Memory sees

In vacant chairs, your absent images,

And points where once you sat, and now should be

But are not.—I demand if ever we

Shall meet as then we met;—and she replies,

Veiling in awe her second-sighted eyes;

“I know the past alone—but summon home

My sister Hope, she speaks of all to come.”

But I, an old diviner, who know well

Every false verse of that sweet oracle,

Turned to the sad enchantress once again,

And sought a respite from my gentle pain,

In acting every passage o’er and o’er

Of our communion.—How on the sea shore

We watched the ocean and the sky together,

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Under the roof of blue Italian weather;

How I ran home through last year’s thunder-storm,

And felt the transverse lightning linger warm

Upon my cheek:—and how we often made

Treats for each other, where good will outweighed

The frugal luxury of our country cheer,

As it well might, were it less firm and clear

Than ours must ever be;—and how we spun

A shroud of talk to hide us from the sun

Of this familiar life, which seems to be

But is not,—or is but quaint mockery

Of all we would believe; or sadly blame

The jarring and inexplicable frame

Of this wrong world:—and then anatomize

The purposes and thoughts of men whose eyes

Were closed in distant years;—or widely guess

The issue of the earth’s great business,

When we shall be as we no longer are;

Like babbling gossips safe, who hear the war

Of winds, and sigh, but tremble not; or how

You listened to some interrupted flow

Of visionary rhyme;—in joy and pain

Struck from the inmost fountains of my brain,

With little skill perhaps;—or how we sought

Those deepest wells of passion or of thought

Wrought by wise poets in the waste of years,

Staining the sacred waters with our tears;

Quenching a thirst ever to be renewed!

Or how I, wisest lady! then indued

The language of a land which now is free,

And winged with thoughts of truth and majesty,

Flits round the tyrant’s sceptre like a cloud,

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And bursts the peopled prisons, and cries aloud,

“My name is Legion!”—that majestic tongue

Which Calderon over the desart flung

Of ages and of nations; and which found

An echo in our hearts, and with the sound

Startled oblivion;—thou wert then to me

As is a nurse—when inarticulately

A child would talk as its grown parents do.

If living winds the rapid clouds pursue,

If hawks chase doves through the aerial way,

Huntsmen the innocent deer, and beasts their prey,

Why should not we rouse with the spirit’s blast

Out of the forest of the pathless past

These recollected pleasures?

You are now

In London, that great sea, whose ebb and flow

At once is deaf and loud, and on the shore

Vomits its wrecks, and still howls on for more.

Yet in its depth what treasures! You will see

* * * * * * *

You will see C—; he who sits obscure

In the exceeding lustre and the pure

Intense irradiation of a mind,

Which, with its own internal lustre blind,

Flags wearily through darkness and despair—

A cloud-encircled meteor of the air,

A hooded eagle among blinking owls.

You will see H—t; one of those happy souls

Which are the salt of the earth, and without whom

This world would smell like what it is—a tomb;

Who is, what others seem;—his room no doubt

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Is still adorned by many a cast from Shout,

With graceful flowers, tastefully placed about;

And coronals of bay from ribbons hung,

And brighter wreaths in neat disorder flung,

The gifts of the most learn’d among some dozens

Of female friends, sisters-in-law and cousins.

And there is he with his eternal puns,

Which beat the dullest brain for smiles, like duns

Thundering for money at a poet’s door;

Alas! it is no use to say, “I’m poor!”

Or oft in graver mood, when he will look

Things wiser than were ever said in book,

Except in Shakespear’s wisest tenderness.

You will see H—, and I cannot express

His virtues, though I know that they are great,

Because he locks, then barricades, the gate

Within which they inhabit;—of his wit

And wisdom, you’ll cry out when you are bit.

He is a pearl within an oyster shell,

One of the richest of the deep. And there

Is English P— with his mountain Fair

Turned into a Flamingo,—that shy bird

That gleams i’the Indian air. Have you not heard

When a man marries, dies, or turns Hindoo,

His best friends hear no more of him? but you

Will see him and will like him too, I hope,

With the milk-white Snowdonian Antelope

Matched with this cameleopard; his fine wit

Makes such a wound, the knife is lost in it;

A strain too learned for a shallow age,

Too wise for selfish bigots;—let his page

Which charms the chosen spirits of the age,

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Fold itself up for a serener clime

Of years to come, and find its recompense

In that just expectation. Wit and sense,

Virtue and human knowledge, all that might

Make this dull world a business of delight,

Are all combined in H. S.—And these,

With some exceptions, which I need not teaze

Your patience by descanting on, are all

You and I know in London.

I recal

My thoughts and bid you look upon the night.

As water does a sponge, so the moonlight

Fills the void, hollow, universal air.

What see you?—Unpavilioned heaven is fair,

Whether the moon, into her chamber gone,

Leaves midnight to the golden stars, or wan

Climbs with diminished beams the azure steep;

Or whether clouds sail o’er the inverse deep,

Piloted by the many wandering blast,

And the rare stars rush through them, dim and fast.

All this is beautiful in every land.

But what see you beside? A shabby stand

Of hackney-coaches—a brick house or wall,

Fencing some lonely court, white with the scrawl

Of our unhappy politics;—or worse—

A wretched woman reeling by, whose curse

Mixed with the watchman’s, partner of her trade,

You must accept in place of serenade—

I see a chaos of green leaves and fruit

Built round dark caverns, even to the root

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Of the living stems who feed them; in whose bowers

There sleep in their dark dew the folded flowers;

Beyond, the surface of the unsickled corn

Trembles not in the slumbering air, and borne

In circles quaint, and ever changing dance,

Like winged stars the fire-flies flash and glance

Pale in the open moonshine; but each one

Under the dark trees seems a little sun,

A meteor tamed; a fixed star gone astray

From the silver regions of the milky way.

Afar the Contadino’s song is heard,

Rude, but made sweet by distance;—and a bird

Which cannot be a nightingale, and yet

I know none else that sings so sweet as it

At this late hour;—and then all is still:—

Now Italy or London, which you will!

Next winter you must pass with me; I’ll have

My house by that time turned into a grave

Of dead despondence and low-thoughted care,

And all the dreams which our tormentors are,

Oh that H— — and — were there,

With every thing belonging to them fair!—

We will have books; Spanish, Italian, Greek,

* * * * * * *

* * * * * * *

* * * * * * *

Though we eat little flesh and drink no wine,

Yet let’s be merry: we’ll have tea and toast;

Custards for supper, and an endless host

Of syllabubs and jellies and mince-pies,

And other such lady-like luxuries,—

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Feasting on which we will philosophise.

And we’ll have fires out of the Grand Duke’s wood,

To thaw the six weeks winter in our blood.

And then we’ll talk;—what shall we talk about?

Oh! there are themes enough for many a bout

Of thought-entangled descant;—as to nerves

With cones and parallelograms and curves,

I’ve sworn to strangle them if once they dare

To bother me,—when you are with me there.

And they shall never more sip laudanum

From Helicon or Himeros;*—we’ll come

And in despite of * * * and of the devil,

Will make our friendly philosophic revel

Outlast the leafless time;—till buds and flowers

Warn the obscure, inevitable hours

Sweet meeting by sad parting to renew;—

“To-morrow to fresh woods and pastures new.”

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THE TRIUMPH OF LIFE.

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Swift as a spirit hastening to his task

Of glory and of good, the Sun sprang forth

Rejoicing in his splendour, and the mask

Of darkness fell from the awakened Earth—

The smokeless altars of the mountain snows

Flamed above crimson clouds, and at the birth

Of light, the Ocean’s orison arose,

To which the birds tempered their matin lay.

All flowers in field or forest which unclose

Their trembling cyelids to the kiss of day,

Swinging their censers in the element,

With orient incense lit by the new ray

Burned slow and inconsumably, and sent

Their odorous sighs up to the smiling air;

And, in succession due, did continent,

Isle, ocean, and all things that in them wear

The form and character of mortal mould,

Rise as the sun their father rose, to bear

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Their portion of the toil, which he of old

Took as his own and then imposed on them:

But I, whom thoughts which must remain untold

Had kept as wakeful as the stars that gem

The cone of night, now they were laid asleep

Stretched my faint limbs beneath the hoary stem

Which an old chesnut flung athwart the steep

Of a green Apennine: before me fled

The night; behind me rose the day; the deep

Was at my feet, and Heaven above my head,

When a strange trance over my fancy grew

Which was not slumber, for the shade it spread

Was so transparent, that the scene came through

As clear as when a veil of light is drawn

O’er evening hills they glimmer; and I knew

That I had felt the freshness of that dawn,

Bathed in the same cold dew my brow and hair,

And sate as thus upon that slope of lawn

Under the self same bough, and heard as there

The birds, the fountains and the ocean hold

Sweet talk in music through the enamoured air,

And then a vision on my brain was rolled.

As in that trance of wondrous thought I lay,

This was the tenour of my waking dream:—

Methought I sate beside a public way

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Thick strewn with summer dust, and a great stream

Of people there was hurrying to and fro,

Numerous as gnats upon the evening gleam,

All hastening onward, yet none seemed to know

Whither he went, or whence he came, or why

He made one of the multitude, and so

Was borne amid the crowd, as through the sky

One of the million leaves of summer’s bier;

Old age and youth, manhood and infancy

Mixed in one mighty torrent did appear,

Some flying from the thing they feared, and some

Seeking the object of another’s fear;

And others as with steps towards the tomb,

Pored on the trodden worms that crawled beneath,

And others mournfully within the gloom

Of their own shadow walked and called it death;

And some fled from it as it were a ghost,

Half fainting in the affliction of vain breath:

But more with motions, which each other crost,

Pursued or spurned the shadows the clouds threw,

Or birds within the noon-day ether lost,

Upon that path where flowers never grew,

And weary with vain toil and faint for thirst,

Heard not the fountains, whose melodious dew

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Out of their mossy cells for ever burst;

Nor felt the breeze which from the forest told

Of grassy paths and wood, lawn-interspersed,

With over-arching elms and caverns cold,

And violet banks where sweet dreams brood, but they

Pursued their serious folly as of old.

And as I gazed, methought that in the way

The throng grew wilder, as the woods of June

When the south wind shakes the extinguished day,

And a cold glare, intenser than the noon,

But icy cold, obscured with [blinding] light

The sun, as he the stars. Like the young moon

When on the sunlit limits of the night

Her white shell trembles amid crimson air,

And whilst the sleeping tempest gathers might,

Doth, as the herald of its coming, bear

The ghost of its dead mother, whose dim frown

Bends in dark ether from her infant’s chair,—

So came a chariot on the silent storm

Of its own rushing splendour, and a Shape

So sate within, as one whom years deform,

Beneath a dusky hood and double cape,

Crouching within the shadow of a tomb,

And o’er what seemed the head a cloud-like crape

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Was bent, a dun and faint etherial gloom

Tempering the light upon the chariot beam;

A Janus-visaged shadow did assume

The guidance of that wonder-winged team;

The shapes which drew in thick lightnings

Were lost:—I heard alone on the air’s soft stream

The music of their ever-moving wings.

All the four faces of that charioteer

Had their eyes banded; little profit brings

Speed in the van and blindness in the rear,

Nor then avail the beams that quench the sun

Or that with banded eyes could pierce the sphere

Of all that is, has been or will be done;

So ill was the car guided—but it past

With solemn speed majestically on.

The crowd gave way, and I arose aghast,

Or seemed to rise, so mighty was the trance,

And saw, like clouds upon the thunders blast,

The million with fierce song and maniac dance

Raging around—such seemed the jubilee

As when to meet some conqueror’s advance

Imperial Rome poured forth her living sea

From senate house, and forum, and theatre,

When [] upon the free

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Had bound a yoke, which soon they stooped to bear.

Nor wanted here the just similitude

Of a triumphal pageant, for where’er

The chariot rolled, a captive multitude

Was driven;—all those who had grown old in power

Or misery,—all who had their age subdued

By action or by suffering, and whose hour

Was drained to its last sand in weal or woe,

So that the trunk survived both fruit and flower;—

All those whose fame or infamy must grow

Till the great winter lay the form and name

Of this green earth with them for ever low;—

All but the sacred few who could not tame

Their spirits to the conquerors—but as soon

As they had touched the world with living flame,

Fled back like eagles to their native noon,

Or those who put aside the diadem

Of earthly thrones or gems []

Were there, of Athens or Jerusalem,

Were neither mid the mighty captives seen,

Nor mid the ribald crowd that followed them,

Nor those who went before fierce and obscene.

The wild dance maddens in the van, and those

Who lead it—fleet as shadows on the green,

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Outspeed the chariot, and without repose

Mix with each other in tempestuous measure

To savage music, wilder as it grows,

They, tortured by their agonizing pleasure,

Convulsed and on the rapid whirlwinds spun

Of that fierce spirit, whose unholy leisure

Was soothed by mischief since the world begun,

Throw back their heads and loose their streaming hair;

And in their dance round her who dims the sun,

Maidens and youths fling their wild arms in air

As their feet twinkle; they recede, and now

Bending within each other’s atmosphere

Kindle invisibly—and as they glow,

Like moths by light attracted and repelled,

Oft to their bright destruction come and go,

Till like two clouds into one vale impelled

That shake the mountains when their lightnings mingle

And die in rain—the fiery band which held

Their natures, snaps—the shock still may tingle;

One falls and then another in the path

Senseless—nor is the desolation single,

Yet ere I can say where—the chariot hath

Past over them—nor other trace I find

But as of foam after the ocean’s wrath

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Is spent upon the desart shore;—behind,

Old men and women foully disarrayed,

Shake their grey hairs in the insulting wind,

To seek, to [], to strain with limbs decayed,

Limping to reach the light which leaves them still

Farther behind and deeper in the shade.

But not the less with impotence of will

They wheel, though ghastly shadows interpose

Round them and round each other, and fulfil

Their work, and in the dust from whence they rose

Sink, and corruption veils them as they lie,

And past in these performs what [] in those.

Struck to the heart by this sad pageantry,

Half to myself I said—And what is this?

Whose shape is that within the car? And why—

I would have added—is all here amiss?—

But a voice answered—“Life!”—I turned, and knew

(Oh Heaven, have mercy on such wretchedness!)

That what I thought was an old root which grew

To strange distortion out of the hill side,

Was indeed one of those deluded crew,

And that the grass, which methought hung so wide

And white, was but his thin discoloured hair,

And that the holes it vainly sought to hide,

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Were or had been eyes:—“If thou canst, forbear

To join the dance, which I had well foreborne!”

Said the grim Feature of my thought: “Aware,

“I will unfold that which to this deep scorn

Led me and my companions, and relate

The progress of the pageant since the morn;

“If thirst of knowledge shall not then abate,

Follow it thou even to the night, but I

Am weary.”—Then like one who with the weight

Of his own words is staggered, wearily

He paused; and ere he could resume, I cried:

“First, who art thou?”—“Before thy memory,

“I feared, loved, hated, suffered, did and died,

And if the spark with which Heaven lit my spirit

Had been with purer sentiment supplied,

“Corruption would not now thus much inherit

Of what was once Rousseau,—nor this disguise

Stained that which ought to have disdained to wear it;

“If I have been extinguished, yet there rise

A thousand beacons from the spark I bore”—

“And who are those chained to the car?”—“The wise,

“The great, the unforgotten,—they who wore

Mitres and helms and crowns, or wreaths of light,

Signs of thought’s empire over thought—their lore

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“Taught them not this, to know themselves; their might

Could not repress the mystery within,

And for the morn of truth they feigned, deep night

“Caught them ere evening.”—“Who is he with chin

Upon his breast, and hands crost on his chain?”—

“The Child of a fierce hour; he sought to win

“The world, and lost all that it did contain

Of greatness, in its hope destroyed; and more

Of fame and peace than virtue’s self can gain

“Without the opportunity which bore

Him on its eagle pinions to the peak

From which a thousand climbers have before

“Fall’n, as Napoleon fell.”—I felt my cheek

Alter, to see the shadow pass away

Whose grasp had left the giant world so weak,

That every pigmy kicked it as it lay;

And much I grieved to think how power and will

In opposition rule our mortal day,

And why God made irreconcilable

Good and the means of good; and for despair

I half disdained mine eyes’ desire to fill

With the spent vision of the times that were

And scarce have ceased to be.—“Dost thou behold,”

Said my guide, “those spoilers spoiled, Voltaire,

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“Frederic, and Paul, Catherine, and Leopold,

And hoary anarchs, demagogues, and sage—

— name the world thinks always old,

“For in the battle, life and they did wage,

She remained conqueror. I was overcome

By my own heart alone, which neither age,

“Nor tears, nor infamy, nor now the tomb

Could temper to its object.”—“Let them pass,”

I cried, “the world and its mysterious doom

“Is not so much more glorious than it was,

That I desire to worship those who drew

New figures on its false and fragile glass

“As the old faded.”—“Figures ever new

Rise on the bubble, paint them as you may;

We have but thrown, as those before us threw,

“Our shadows on it as it past away.

But mark how chained to the triumphal chair

The mighty phantoms of an elder day;

“All that is mortal of great Plato there

Expiates the joy and woe his master knew not;

The star that ruled his doom was far too fair,

“And life, where long that flower of Heaven grew not,

Conquered that heart by love, which gold, or pain,

Or age, or sloth, or slavery could subdue not.

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“And near walk the [] twain,

The tutor and his pupil, whom Dominion

Followed as tame as vulture in a chain.

“The world was darkened beneath either pinion

Of him whom from the flock of conquerors

Fame singled out for her thunder-bearing minion;

“The other long outlived both woes and wars,

Throned in the thoughts of men, and still had kept

The jealous key of truth’s eternal doors,

“If Bacon’s eagle spirit had not leapt

Like lightning out of darkness—he compelled

The Proteus shape of Nature as it slept

“To wake, and lead him to the caves that held

The treasure of the secrets of its reign.

See the great bards of elder time, who quelled

“The passions which they sung, as by their strain

May well be known: their living melody

Tempers its own contagion to the vein

“Of those who are infected with it—I

Have suffered what I wrote, or viler pain!

And so my words have seeds of misery”—

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[There is a chasm here in the MS. which it is impossible to fill up. It appears from the context, that other shapes pass, and that Rousseau still stood beside the dreamer, as]—

— he pointed to a company,

Midst whom I quickly recognised the heirs

Of Cæsar’s crime, from him to Constantine;

The anarch chiefs, whose force and murderous snares

Had founded many a sceptre-bearing line,

And spread the plague of gold and blood abroad:

And Gregory and John, and men divine,

Who rose like shadows between man and God;

Till that eclipse, still hanging over heaven,

Was worshipped by the world o’er which they strode,

For the true sun it quenched—“Their power was given

But to destroy,” replied the leader:—“I

Am one of those who have created, even

“If it be but a world of agony.”—

“Whence comest thou? and whither goest thou?

How did thy course begin?” I said, “and why?

“Mine eyes are sick of this perpetual flow

Of people, and my heart sick of one sad thought—

Speak!”—“Whence I am, I partly seem to know,

“And how and by what paths I have been brought

To this dread pass, methinks even thou mayst guess;—

Why this should be, my mind can compass not;

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“Whither the conqueror hurries me, still less;—

But follow thou, and from spectator turn

Actor or victim in this wretchedness,

“And what thou wouldst be taught I then may learn

From thee. Now listen:—In the April prime,

When all the forest tips began to burn

“With kindling green, touched by the azure clime

Of the young year’s dawn, I was laid asleep

Under a mountain, which from unknown time

“Had yawned into a cavern, high and deep;

And from it came a gentle rivulet,

Whose water, like clear air, in its calm sweep

“Bent the soft grass, and kept forever wet

The stems of the sweet flowers, and filled the grove

With sounds, which whoso hears must needs forget

“All pleasure and all pain, all hate and love,

Which they had known before that hour of rest;

A sleeping mother then would dream not of

“Her only child who died upon her breast

At eventide—a king would mourn no more

The crown of which his brows were dispossest

“When the sun lingered o’er his ocean floor,

To gild his rival’s new prosperity.

Thou wouldst forget thus vainly to deplore

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“Ills, which if ills can find no cure from thee,

The thought of which no other sleep will quell,

Nor other music blot from memory,

“So sweet and deep is the oblivious spell;

And whether life had been before that sleep

The heaven which I imagine, or a hell

“Like this harsh world in which I wake to weep,

I know not. I arose, and for a space

The scene of woods and waters seemed to keep,

“Though it was now broad day, a gentle trace

Of light diviner than the common sun

Sheds on the common earth, and all the place

“Was filled with magic sounds woven into one

Oblivious melody, confusing sense

Amid the gliding waves and shadows dun;

“And, as I looked, the bright omnipresence

Of morning through the orient cavern flowed,

And the sun’s image radiantly intense

“Burned on the waters of the well that glowed

Like gold, and threaded all the forest’s maze

With winding paths of emerald fire; there stood

“Amid the sun, as he amid the blaze

Of his own glory, on the vibrating

Floor of the fountain, paved with flashing rays,

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“A Shape all light, which with one hand did fling

Dew on the earth, as if she were the dawn,

And the invisible rain did ever sing

“A silver music on the mossy lawn;

And still before me on the dusky grass,

Iris her many-coloured scarf had drawn:

“In her right hand she bore a crystal glass,

Mantling with bright Nepenthe; the fierce splendour

Fell from her as she moved under the mass

“Out of the deep cavern, with palms so tender,

Their tread broke not the mirror of its billow;

She glided along the river, and did bend her

“Head under the dark boughs, till like a willow,

Her fair hair swept the bosom of the stream

That whispered with delight to be its pillow.

“As one enamoured is upborne in dream

O’er lily-paven lakes mid silver mist,

To wondrous music, so this shape might seem

“Partly to tread the waves with feet which kissed

The dancing foam; partly to glide along

The air which roughened the moist amethyst,

“Or the faint morning beams that fell among

The trees, or the soft shadows of the trees;

And her feet, ever to the ceaseless song

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“Of leaves, and winds, and waves, and birds, and bees,

And falling drops, moved to a measure new

Yet sweet, as on the summer evening breeze,

“Up from the lake a shape of golden dew

Between two rocks, athwart the rising moon,

Dances i’ the wind, where never eagle flew;

“And still her feet, no less than the sweet tune

To which they moved, seemed as they moved, to blot

The thoughts of him who gazed on them; and soon

“All that was, seemed as if it had been not;

And all the gazer’s mind was strewn beneath

Her feet like embers; and she, thought by thought,

“Trampled its sparks into the dust of death;

As day upon the threshold of the east

Treads out the lamps of night, until the breath

“Of darkness re-illumine even the least

Of heaven’s living eyes—like day she came,

Making the night a dream; and ere she ceased

“To move, as one between desire and shame

Suspended, I said—If, as it doth seem,

Thou comest from the realm without a name,

“Into this valley of perpetual dream,

Shew whence I came, and where I am, and why—

Pass not away upon the passing stream.

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“Arise and quench thy thirst, was her reply.

And as a shut lily, stricken by the wand

Of dewy morning’s vital alchemy,

“I rose; and, bending at her sweet command,

Touched with faint lips the cup she raised,

And suddenly my brain became as sand

“Where the first wave had more than half erased

The track of deer on desart Labrador;

Whilst the wolf, from which they fled amazed,

“Leaves his stamp visibly upon the shore,

Until the second bursts;—so on my sight

Burst a new vision, never seen before,

“And the fair shape waned in the coming light,

As veil by veil the silent splendour drops

From Lucifer, amid the chrysolite

“Of sun-rise, ere it tinge the mountain tops;

And as the presence of that fairest planet,

Although unseen, is felt by one who hopes

“That his day’s path may end as he began it,

In that star’s smile, whose light is like the scent

Of a jonquil when evening breezes fan it,

“Or the soft note in which his dear lament

The Brescian shepherd breathes, or the caress

That turned his weary slumber to content;*

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“So knew I in that light’s severe excess

The presence of that shape which on the stream

Moved, as I moved along the wilderness,

“More dimly than a day-appearing dream,

The ghost of a forgotten form of sleep;

A light of heaven, whose half-extinguished beam

“Through the sick day in which we wake to weep,

Glimmers, for ever sought, for ever lost;

So did that shape its obscure tenour keep

“Beside my path, as silent as a ghost;

But the new Vision, and the cold bright car,

With solemn speed and stunning music, crost

“The forest, and as if from some dread war

Triumphantly returning, the loud million

Fiercely extolled the fortune of her star.

“A moving arch of victory, the vermilion

And green and azure plumes of Iris had

Built high over her wind-winged pavilion,

“And underneath etherial glory clad

The wilderness, and far before her flew

The tempest of the splendour, which forbade

“Shadow to fall from leaf and stone; the crew

Seemed in that light, like atomies to dance

Within a sunbeam;—some upon the new

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“Embroidery of flowers, that did enhance

The grassy vesture of the desart, played,

Forgetful of the chariot’s swift advance;

“Others stood gazing, till within the shade

Of the great mountain its light left them dim;

Others outspeeded it; and others made

“Circles around it, like the clouds that swim

Round the high moon in a bright sea of air;

And more did follow, with exulting hymn,

“The chariot and the captives fettered there:—

But all like bubbles on an eddying flood

Fell into the same track at last, and were

“Borne onward.—I among the multitude

Was swept—me, sweetest flowers delayed not long;

Me, not the shadow nor the solitude;

“Me, not that falling stream’s Lethean song;

Me, not the phantom of that early form,

Which moved upon its motion—but among

“The thickest billows of that living storm

I plunged, and bared my bosom to the clime

Of that cold light, whose airs too soon deform.

“Before the chariot had begun to climb

The opposing steep of that mysterious dell,

Behold a wonder worthy of the rhyme

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“Of him who from the lowest depths of hell,

Through every paradise and through all glory,

Love led serene, and who returned to tell

“The words of hate and care; the wondrous story

How all things are transfigured except Love;

For deaf as is a sea, which wrath makes hoary,

“The world can hear not the sweet notes that move

The sphere whose light is melody to lovers—

A wonder worthy of his rhyme—the grove

“Grew dense with shadows to its inmost covers,

The earth was grey with phantoms, and the air

Was peopled with dim forms, as when there hovers

“A flock of vampire-bats before the glare

Of the tropic sun, bringing, ere evening,

Strange night upon some Indian vale;—thus were

“Phantoms diffused around; and some did fling

Shadows of shadows, yet unlike themselves,

Behind them; some like eaglets on the wing

“Were lost in the white day; others like elves

Danced in a thousand unimagined shapes

Upon the sunny streams and grassy shelves;

“And others sate chattering like restless apes

On vulgar hands, * * * * *

Some made a cradle of the ermined capes

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“Of kingly mantles; some across the tire

Of pontiffs rode, like demons; others played

Under the crown which girt with empire

“A baby’s or an ideot’s brow, and made

Their nests in it. The old anatomies

Sate hatching their bare broods under the shade

“Of demon wings, and laughed from their dead eyes

To reassume the delegated power,

Array’d in which those worms did monarchize,

“Who make this earth their charnel. Others more

Humble, like falcons, sate upon the fist

Of common men, and round their heads did soar;

“Or like small gnats and flies, as thick as mist

On evening marshes, thronged about the brow

Of lawyers, statesmen, priest and theorist:—

“And others, like discoloured flakes of snow

On fairest bosoms and the sunniest hair,

Fell, and were melted by the youthful glow

“Which they extinguished; and, like tears, they were

A veil to those from whose faint lids they rained

In drops of sorrow. I became aware

“Of whence those forms proceeded which thus stained

The track in which we moved. After brief space,

From every form the beauty slowly waned;

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“From every firmest limb and fairest face

The strength and freshness fell like dust, and left

The action and the shape without the grace

“Of life. The marble brow of youth was cleft

With care; and in those eyes where once hope shone,

Desire, like a lioness bereft

“Of her last cub, glared ere it died; each one

Of that great crowd sent forth incessantly

These shadows, numerous as the dead leaves blown

“In autumn evening from a poplar tree.

Each like himself and like each other were

At first; but some distorted seemed to be

“Obscure clouds, moulded by the casual air;

And of this stuff the car’s creative ray

Wrapt all the busy phantoms that were there,

“As the sun shapes the clouds; thus on the way

Mask after mask fell from the countenance

And form of all; and long before the day

“Was old, the joy which waked like heaven’s glance

The sleepers in the oblivious valley, died;

And some grew weary of the ghastly dance,

“And fell, as I have fallen, by the way side;—

Those soonest from whose forms most shadows past,

And least of strength and beauty did abide.

“Then, what is life? I cried.”—

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FRAGMENTS FROM AN UNFINISHED DRAMA.

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He came like a dream in the dawn of life,

He fled like a shadow before its noon;

He is gone, and my peace is turned to strife,

And I wander and wane like the weary moon.

O sweet Echo wake,

And for my sake

Make answer the while my heart shall break!

But heart has a music which Echo’s lips,

Though tender and true, yet can answer not,

And the shadow that moves in the soul’s eclipse

Can return not the kiss by his now forgot;

Sweet lips! he who hath

On my desolate path

Cast the darkness of absence worse than death!

Indian.

And if my grief should still be dearer to me

Than all the pleasure in the world beside,

Why would you lighten it?—

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Lady.

I offer only

That which I seek, some human sympathy

In this mysterious island.

The Indian.

Oh! my friend,

My sister, my beloved! What do I say?

My brain is dizzy and I scarce know whether

I speak to thee or her. Peace, perturbed heart!

I am to thee only as thou to mine,

The passing wind which heals the brow at noon,

And may strike cold into the breast at night,

Yet cannot linger where it soothes the most,

Or long soothe could it linger. But you said

You also loved?

Lady.

Loved! Oh, I love. Methinks

This word of love is fit for all the world,

And that for gentle hearts another name

Would speak of gentler thoughts than the world owns.

I have loved.

The Indian.

And thou lovest not? if so

Young as thou art thou canst afford to weep.

Lady.

Oh! would that I could claim exemption

From all the bitterness of that sweet name.

I loved, I love, and when I love no more

Let joys and grief perish, and leave despair

To ring the knell of youth. He stood beside me,

The embodied vision of the brightest dream,

Which like a dawn heralds the day of life;

The shadow of his presence made my world

A paradise. All familiar things he touched,

All common words he spoke, became to me

Like forms and sounds of a diviner world.

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He was as is the sun in his fierce youth,

As terrible and lovely as a tempest;

He came, and went, and left me what I am.

Alas! Why must I think how oft we two

Have sate together near the river springs,

Under the green pavilion which the willow

Spreads on the floor of the unbroken fountain,

Strewn by the nurslings that linger there,

Over that islet paved with flowers and moss,

While the musk-rose leaves, like flakes of crimson snow,

Showered on us, and the dove mourned in the pine,

Sad prophetess of sorrows not our own.

Indian.

Your breath is like soft music, your words are

The echoes of a voice which on my heart

Sleeps like a melody of early days.

But as you said—

Lady.

He was so awful, yet

So beautiful in mystery and terror,

Calming me as the loveliness of heaven

Soothes the unquiet sea:—and yet not so,

For he seemed stormy, and would often seem

A quenchless sun masked in portentous clouds;

For such his thoughts, and even his actions were;

But he was not of them, nor they of him,

But as they hid his splendour from the earth.

Some said he was a man of blood and peril,

And steeped in bitter infamy to the lips.

More need was there I should be innocent,

More need that I should be most true and kind,

And much more need that there should be found one

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To share remorse, and scorn and solitude,

And all the ills that wait on those who do

The tasks of ruin in the world of life.

He fled and I have followed him.

February, 1822

.

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PRINCE ATHANASE:
A FRAGMENT.

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There was a youth, who, as with toil and travel,

Had grown quite weak and grey before his time;

Nor any could the restless griefs unravel

Which burned within him, withering up his prime

And goading him, like fiends, from land to land.

Not his the load of any secret crime,

For nought of ill his heart could understand,

But pity and wild sorrow for the same;—

Not his the thirst for glory or command

Baffled with blast of hope-consuming shame;

Nor evil joys which fire the vulgar breast

And quench in speedy smoke its feeble flame,

Had left within his soul their dark unrest:

Nor what religion fables of the grave

Feared he,—Philosophy’s accepted guest.

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For none than he a purer heart could have,

Or that loved good more for itself alone;

Of nought in heaven or earth was he the slave.

What sorrow deep, and shadowy, and unknown,

Sent him, a hopeless wanderer, through mankind?—

If with a human sadness he did groan,

He had a gentle yet aspiring mind;

Just, innocent, with varied learning fed,

And such a glorious consolation find

In others’ joy, when all their own is dead:

He loved, and laboured for his kind in grief,

And yet, unlike all others, it is said,

That from such toil he never found relief;

Although a child of fortune and of power,

Of an ancestral name the orphan chief.

His soul had wedded wisdom, and her dower

Is love and justice, clothed in which he sate

Apart from men, as in a lonely tower,

Pitying the tumult of their dark estate—

Yet even in youth did he not e’er abuse

The strength of wealth or thought, to consecrate

Those false opinions which the harsh rich use

To blind the world they famish for their pride;

Nor did he hold from any man his dues,

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But like a steward in honest dealings tried,

With those who toiled and wept, the poor and wise

His riches and his cares he did divide.

Fearless he was, and scorning all disguise,

What he dared do or think, though men might start,

He spoke with mild yet unaverted eyes;

Liberal he was of soul, and frank of heart,

And to his many friends—all loved him well—

Whate’er he knew or felt he would impart,

If words he found those inmost thoughts to tell;

If not, he smiled or wept; and his weak foes

He neither spurned nor hated, though with fell

And mortal hate their thousand voices rose,

They past like aimless arrows from his ear—

Nor did his heart or mind its portal close

To those, or them, or any whom life’s sphere

May comprehend within its wide array.

What sadness made that vernal spirit sere?

He knew not. Though his life, day after day,

Was failing like an unreplenished stream,

Though in his eyes a cloud and burthen lay,

Through which his soul, like Vespers’ serene beam

Piercing the chasms of ever rising clouds,

Shone, softly burning; though his lips did seem

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Like reeds which quiver in impetuous floods;

And through his sleep, and o’er each waking hour,

Thoughts after thoughts, unresting multitudes,

Were driven within him, by some secret power,

Which bade them blaze, and live, and roll afar,

Like lights and sounds, from haunted tower to tower

O’er castled mountains borne, when tempest’s war

Is levied by the night-contending winds,

And the pale dalesmen watch with eager ear;—

Though such were in his spirit, as the fiends

Which wake and feed on everliving woe,—

What was this grief, which ne’er in other minds

A mirror found,—he knew not—none could know;

But on whoe’er might question him he turned

The light of his frank eyes, as if to show,

He knew not of the grief within that burned,

But asked forbearance with a mournful look;

Or spoke in words from which none ever learned

The cause of his disquietude; or shook

With spasms of silent passion; or turned pale:

So that his friends soon rarely undertook

To stir his secret pain without avail;—

For all who knew and loved him then perceived

That there was drawn an adamantine veil

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Between his heart and mind,—both unrelieved

Wrought in his brain and bosom separate strife.

Some said that he was mad, others believed

That memories of an antenatal life

Made this, where now he dwelt, a penal hell;

And others said that such mysterious grief

From God’s displeasure, like a darkness, fell

On souls like his which owned no higher law

Than love; love calm, stedfast, invincible

By mortal fear or supernatural awe;

And others,—“ ’Tis the shadow of a dream

Which the veiled eye of memory never saw

“But through the soul’s abyss, like some dark stream

Through shattered mines and caverns underground

Rolls, shaking its foundations; and no beam

“Of joy may rise, but it is quenched and drowned

In the dim whirlpools of this dream obscure,

Soon its exhausted waters will have found

“A lair of rest beneath thy spirit pure,

O Athanase!—in one so good and great,

Evil or tumult cannot long endure.”

So spake they: idly of another’s state

Babbling vain words and fond philosophy;

This was their consolation; such debate

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Men held with one another; nor did he

Like one who labours with a human woe

Decline this talk; as if its theme might be

Another, not himself, he to and fro

Questioned and canvassed it with subtlest wit,

And none but those who loved him best could know

That which he knew not, how it galled and bit

His weary mind, this converse vain and cold;

For like an eyeless night-mare grief did sit

Upon his being; a snake which fold by fold

Pressed out the life of life, a clinging fiend

Which clenched him if he stirred with deadlier hold;—

And so his grief remained—let it remain—untold.*

December, 1817

.

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ODE TO NAPLES.*

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EPODE I. α.

I stood within the city disinterred;†

And heard the autumnal leaves like light footfalls

Of spirits passing through the streets; and heard

The Mountain’s slumberous voice at intervals

Thrill through those roofless halls;

The oracular thunder penetrating shook

The listening soul in my suspended blood;

I felt that Earth out of her deep heart spoke—

I felt, but heard not:—through white columns glowed

The isle-sustaining Ocean-flood,

A plane of light between two Heavens of azure:

Around me gleamed many a bright sepulchre

Of whose pure beauty, Time, as if his pleasure

Were to spare Death, had never made erasure;

But every living lineament was clear

As in the sculptor’s thought; and there

The wreathes of stony myrtle, ivy and pine,

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Like winter leaves o’ergrown by moulded snow,

Seemed only not to move and grow

Because the crystal silence of the air

Weighed on their life; even as the Power divine

Which then lulled all things, brooded upon mine.

EPODE II. α.

Then gentle winds arose

With many a mingled close

Of wild Æolian sound and mountain odour keen;

And where the Baian ocean

Welters with airlike motion,

Within, above, around its bowers of starry green,

Moving the sea flowers in those purple caves

Even as the ever stormless atmosphere

Floats o’er the Elysian realm,

It bore me like an Angel, o’er the waves

Of sunlight, whose swift pinnace of dewy air

No storm can overwhelm;

I sailed, where ever flows

Under the calm Serene

A spirit of deep emotion

From the unknown graves

Of the dead kings of Melody.*

Shadowy Aornos darkened o’er the helm

The horizontal æther; heaven stript bare

Its depths over Elysium, where the prow

Made the invisible water white as snow;

From that Typhæan mount, Inarime

There streamed a sunlike vapour, like the standard

Of some ethereal host;

Whilst from all the coast,

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Louder and louder, gathering round, there wandered

Over the oracular woods and divine sea

Prophesyings which grew articulate—

They seize me—I must speak them—be they fate!

STROPHE α. I.

Naples! thou Heart of men which ever pantest

Naked, beneath the lidless eye of heaven!

Elysian City which to calm enchantest

The mutinous air and sea: they round thee, even

As sleep round Love, are driven!

Metropolis of a ruined Paradise

Long lost, late won, and yet but half regained!

Bright Altar of the bloodless sacrifice,

Which armed Victory offers up unstained

To Love, the flower-enchained!

Thou which wert once, and then didst cease to be,

Now art, and henceforth ever shalt be, free,

If Hope, and Truth, and Justice can avail,

Hail, hail, all hail!

STROPHE β. 2.

Thou youngest giant birth

Which from the groaning earth

Leap’st, clothed in armour of impenetrable scale!

Last, of the Intercessors!

Who ’gainst the Crowned Transgressors

Pleadest before God’s love! Arrayed in Wisdom’s mail,

Wave thy lightning lance in mirth

Nor let thy high heart fail,

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Though from their hundred gates the leagued Oppressors,

With hurried legions move!

Hail, hail, all hail!

ANTISTROPHE α.

What though Cimmerian Anarchs dare blaspheme

Freedom and thee? thy shield is as a mirror

To make their blind slaves see, and with fierce gleam

To turn his hungry sword upon the wearer,

A new Acteon’s error

Shall their’s have been—devoured by their own hounds!

Be thou like the imperial Basilisk

Killing thy foe with unapparent wounds!

Gaze on oppression, till at that dread risk

Aghast she pass from the Earth’s disk,

Fear not, but gaze—for freemen mightier grow,

And slaves more feeble, gazing on their foe;

If Hope and Truth and Justice may avail,

Thou shalt be great—All hail!

ANTISTROPHE β. 2.

From Freedom’s form divine,

From Nature’s inmost shrine,

Strip every impious gawd, rend Error veil by veil:

O’er Ruin desolate,

O’er Falsehood’s fallen state

Sit thou sublime, unawed; be the Destroyer pale!

And equal laws be thine,

And winged words let sail,

Freighted with truth even from the throne of God:

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That wealth, surviving fate,

Be thine.—All hail!

ANTISTROPHE α. γ.

Didst thou not start to hear Spain’s thrilling pæan

From land to land re-echoed solemnly,

Till silence became music? From the Æean*

To the cold Alps, eternal Italy

Starts to hear thine! The Sea

Which paves the desart streets of Venice laughs

In light and music; widowed Genoa wan

By moonlight spells ancestral epitaphs,

Murmuring, where is Doria? fair Milan,

Within whose veins long ran

The vipers† palsying venom, lifts her heel

To bruise his head. The signal and the seal

(If Hope and Truth and Justice can avail)

Art Thou of all these hopes.—O hail!

ANTISTROPHE β. γ.

Florence! beneath the sun,

Of cities fairest one,

Blushes within her bower for Freedom’s expectation:

From eyes of quenchless hope

Rome tears the priestly cope,

As fuling once by power, so now by admiration,

An athlete stript to run

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From a remoter station

For the high prize lost on Philippi’s shore:—

As then Hope, Truth, and Justice did avail,

So now may Fraud and Wrong! O hail!

EPODE I. β.

Hear ye the march as of the Earth-born Forms

Arrayed against the everliving Gods?

The crash and darkness of a thousand storms

Bursting their inaccessible abodes

Of crags and thunder-clouds?

See ye the banners blazoned to the day,

Inwrought with emblems of barbaric pride?

Dissonant threats kill Silence far away,

The serene Heaven which wraps our Eden wide

With iron light is dyed,

The Anarchs of the North lead forth their legions

Like Chaos o’er creation, uncreating;

An hundred tribes nourished on strange religions

And lawless slaveries,—down the aerial regions

Of the white Alps, desolating,

Famished wolves that bide no waiting,

Blotting the glowing footsteps of old glory,

Trampling our columned cities into dust,

Their dull and savage lust

On Beauty’s corse to sickness satiating—

They come! The fields they tread look black and hoary

With fire—from their red feet the streams run gory!

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EPODE II. β.

Great Spirit, deepest Love!

Which rulest and dost move

All things which live and are, within the Italian shore;

Who spreadest heaven around it,

Whose woods, rocks, waves, surround it;

Who sittest in thy star, o’er Ocean’s western floor,

Spirit of beauty! at whose soft command

The sunbeams and the showers distil its foison

From the Earth’s bosom chill;

O bid those beams be each a blinding brand

Of lightning! bid those showers be dews of poison!

Bid the Earth’s plenty kill!

Bid thy bright Heaven above,

Whilst light and darkness bound it,

Be their tomb who planned

To make it ours and thine!

Or, with thine harmonizing ardours fill

And raise thy sons, as o’er the prone horizon

Thy lamp feeds every twilight wave with fire—

Be man’s high hope and unextinct desire,

The instrument to work thy will divine!

Then clouds from sunbeams, antelopes from leopards,

And frowns and fears from Thee,

Would not more swiftly flee

Than Celtic wolves from the Ausonian shepherds.—

Whatever, Spirit, from thy starry shrine

Thou yieldest or withholdest, Oh let be

This city of thy worship ever free!

September, 1820

.

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MARIANNE’S DREAM.

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A pale dream came to a Lady fair,

And said, a boon, a boon, I pray!

I know the secrets of the air,

And things are lost in the glare of day,

Which I can make the sleeping see,

If they will put their trust in me.

And thou shalt know of things unknown,

If thou wilt let me rest between

The veiny lids, whose fringe is thrown

Over thine eyes so dark and sheen:

And half in hope, and half in fright,

The Lady closed her eyes so bright.

At first all deadly shapes were driven

Tumultuously across her sleep,

And o’er the vast cope of bending heaven

All ghastly visaged clouds did sweep;

And the Lady ever looked to spy

If the gold sun shone forth on high.

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And as towards the east she turned,

She saw aloft in the morning air,

Which now with hues of sunrise burned

A great black Anchor rising there;

And wherever the Lady turned her eyes,

It hung before her in the skies.

The sky was blue as the summer sea,

The depths were cloudless over head,

The air was calm as it could be,

There was no sight or sound of dread,

But that black Anchor floating still

Over the piny eastern hill.

The Lady grew sick with a weight of fear,

To see that Anchor ever hanging,

And veiled her eyes; she then did hear

The sound as of a dim low clanging,

And looked abroad if she might know

Was it aught else, or but the flow

Of the blood in her own veins, to and fro.

There was a mist in the sunless air,

Which shook as it were with an earthquake’s shock,

But the very weeds that blossomed there

Were moveless, and each mighty rock

Stood on its basis stedfastly;

The Anchor was seen no more on high.

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But piled around, with summits hid

In lines of cloud at intervals,

Stood many a mountain pyramid

Among whose everlasting walls

Two mighty cities shone, and ever

Through the red mist their domes did quiver

On two dread mountains, from whose crest,

Might seem, the eagle, for her brood,

Would ne’er have hung her dizzy nest,

Those tower-encircled cities stood.

A vision strange such towers to see,

Sculptured and wrought so gorgeously,

Where human art could never be.

And columns framed of marble white,

And giant fanes, dome over dome

Piled, and triumphant gates, all bright

With workmanship, which could not come

From touch of mortal instrument,

Shot o’er the vales, or lustre lent

From its own shapes magnificent.

But still the Lady heard that clang

Filling the wide air far away;

And still the mist whose light did hang

Among the mountains shook alway,

So that the Lady’s heart beat fast,

As half in joy, and half aghast,

On those high domes her look she cast.

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Sudden, from out that city sprung

A light that made the earth grow red;

Two flames that each with quivering tongu

Licked its high domes, and over head

Among those mighty towers and fanes

Dropped fire, as a volcano rains

Its sulphurous ruin on the plains.

And hark! a rush as if the deep

Had burst its bonds; she looked behind

And saw over the western steep

A raging flood descend, and wind

Through that wide vale; she felt no fear,

But said within herself, ’tis clear

These towers are Nature’s own, and she

To save them has sent forth the sea.

And now those raging billows came

Where that fair Lady sate, and she

Was borne towards the showering flame

By the wild waves heaped tumultuously,

And on a little plank, the flow

Of the whirlpool bore her to and fro.

The waves were fiercely vomited

From every tower and every dome,

And dreary light did widely shed

O’er that vast flood’s suspended foam,

Beneath the smoke which hung its night

On the stained cope of heaven’s light.

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The plank whereon that Lady sate

Was driven through the chasms, about and about,

Between the peaks so desolate

Of the drowning mountain, in and out,

As the thistle-beard on a whirlwind sails—

While the flood was filling those hollow vales.

At last her plank an eddy crost,

And bore her to the city’s wall,

Which now the flood had reached almost;

It might the stoutest heart appal

To hear the fire roar and hiss

Through the domes of those mighty palaces.

The eddy whirled her round and round

Before a gorgeous gate, which stood

Piercing the clouds of smoke which bound

Its aery arch with light like blood;

She looked on that gate of marble clear,

With wonder that extinguished fear.

For it was filled with sculptures rarest,

Of forms most beautiful and strange,

Like nothing human, but the fairest

Of winged shapes, whose legions range

Throughout the sleep of those that are,

Like this same Lady, good and fair.

And as she looked, still lovelier grew

Those marble forms;—the sculptor sure

Was a strong spirit, and the hue

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Of his own mind did there endure

After the touch, whose power had braided

Such grace, was in some sad change faded.

She looked, the flames were dim, the flood

Grew tranquil as a woodland river

Winding through hills in solitude;

Those marble shapes then seemed to quiver,

And their fair limbs to float in motion,

Like weeds unfolding in the ocean.

And their lips moved; one seemed to speak,

When suddenly the mountain crackt,

And through the chasm the flood did break

With an earth-uplifting cataract:

The statues gave a joyous scream,

And on its wings the pale thin dream

Lifted the Lady from the stream.

The dizzy flight of that phantom pale

Waked the fair Lady from her sleep,

And she arose, while from the veil

Of her dark eyes the dream did creep,

And she walked about as one who knew

That sleep has sights as clear and true

As any waking eyes can view.

Marlow

,

1817

.

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MONT BLANC.
LINES WRITTEN IN THE VALE OF CHAMOUNI.

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I.

The everlasting universe of things

Flows through the mind, and rolls its rapid waves,

Now dark—now glittering—now reflecting gloom—

Now lending splendour, where from secret springs

The source of human thought its tribute brings

Of waters,—with a sound but half its own,

Such as a feeble brook will oft assume

In the wild woods, among the mountains lone,

Where waterfalls around it leap for ever,

Where woods and winds contend, and a vast river

Over its rocks ceaselessly bursts and raves.

II.

Thus thou, Ravine of Arve—dark, deep Ravine—

Thou many-coloured, many-voiced vale,

Over whose pines and crags and caverns sail

Fast cloud, shadows, and sunbeams: awful scene,

Where Power in likeness of the Arve comes down

From the ice gulphs that gird his secret throne,

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Bursting through these dark mountains like the flame

Of lightning thro’ the tempest;—thou dost lie,

Thy giant brood of pines around thee clinging,

Children of elder time, in whose devotion

The chainless winds still come and ever came

To drink their odours, and their mighty swinging

To hear—an old and solemn harmony:

Thine earthly rainbows stretched across the sweep

Of the ethereal waterfall, whose veil

Robes some unsculptured image; the strange sleep

Which, when the voices of the desart fail,

Wraps all in its own deep eternity;—

Thy caverns echoing to the Arve’s commotion

A loud, lone sound, no other sound can tame;

Thou art pervaded with that ceaseless motion,

Thou art the path of that unresting sound—

Dizzy Ravine! and when I gaze on thee

I seem as in a trance sublime and strange

To muse on my own separate phantasy,

My own, my human mind, which passively

Now renders and receives fast influencings,

Holding an unremitting interchange

With the clear universe of things around;

One legion of wild thoughts, whose wandering wings

Now float above thy darkness, and now rest

Where that or thou art no unbidden guest,

In the still cave of the witch Poesy,

Seeking among the shadows that pass by

Ghosts of all things that are, some shade of thee,

Some phantom, some faint image; till the breast

From which they fled recals them, thou art there!

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III.

Some say that gleams of a remoter world

Visit the soul in sleep,—that death is slumber,

And that its shapes the busy thoughts outnumber

Of those who wake and live.—I look on high;

Has some unknown omnipotence unfurled

The veil of life and death? or do I lie

In dream, and does the mightier world of sleep

Spread far around and inaccessibly

Its circles? For the very spirit fails,

Driven like a homeless cloud from steep to steep

That vanishes among the viewless gales!

Far, far above, piercing the infinite sky,

Mont Blanc appears,—still, snowy, and serene—

Its subject mountains their unearthly forms

Pile around it, ice and rock; broad vales between

Of frozen floods, unfathomable deeps,

Blue as the overhanging heaven, that spread

And wind among the accumulated steeps;

A desart peopled by the storms alone,

Save when the eagle brings some hunter’s bone,

And the wolf tracts her there—how hideously

Its shapes are heaped around! rude, bare, and high,

Ghastly, and scarred, and riven.—Is this the scene

Where the old Earthquake-dæmon taught her young

Ruin? Were these their toys? or did a sea

Of fire envelope once this silent snow?

None can reply—all seems eternal now.

The wilderness has a mysterious tongue

Which teaches awful doubt, or faith so mild,

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So solemn, so serene, that man may be

But for such faith with nature reconciled;

Thou hast a voice, great Mountain, to repeal

Large codes of fraud and woe; not understood

By all, but which the wise, and great, and good

Interpret, or make felt, or deeply feel.

IV.

The fields, the lakes, the forests, and the streams,

Ocean, and all the living things that dwell

Within the dædal earth; lightning, and rain,

Earthquake, and fiery flood, and hurricane,

The torpor of the year when feeble dreams

Visit the hidden buds, or dreamless sleep

Holds every future leaf and flower;—the bound

With which from that detested trance they leap;

The works and ways of man, their death and birth,

And that of him and all that his may be;

All things that move and breathe with toil and sound

Are born and die, revolve, subside and swell.

Power dwells apart in its tranquillity

Remote, serene, and inaccessible:

And this, the naked countenance of earth,

On which I gaze, even these primæval mountains,

Teach the adverting mind. The glaciers creep

Like snakes that watch their prey, from their far fountains,

Slow rolling on; there, many a precipice

Frost and the Sun in scorn of mortal power

Have piled—dome, pyramid, and pinnacle,

A city of death, distinct with many a tower

And wall impregnable of beaming ice.

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Yet not a city, but a flood of ruin

Is there, that from the boundaries of the sky

Rolls its perpetual stream; vast pines are strewing

Its destined path, or in the mangled soil

Branchless and shattered stand; the rocks, drawn down

From yon remotest waste, have overthrown

The limits of the dead and living world,

Never to be reclaimed. The dwelling-place

Of insects, beasts, and birds becomes its spoil;

Their food and their retreat for ever gone,

So much of life and joy is lost. The race

Of man flies far in dread; his work and dwelling

Vanish, like smoke before the tempest’s stream,

And their place is not known. Below, vast caves

Shine in the rushing torrent’s restless gleam,

Which from those secret chasms in tumult welling

Meet in the vale, and one majestic River,

The breath and blood of distant lands, for ever

Rolls its loud waters to the ocean waves,

Breathes its swift vapours to the circling air.

V.

Mont Blanc yet gleams on high:—the power is there,

The still and solemn power of many sights

And many sounds, and much of life and death.

In the calm darkness of the moonless nights,

In the lone glare of day, the snows descend

Upon that Mountain; none beholds them there,

Nor when the flakes burn in the sinking sun,

Or the star-beams dart through them:—Winds contend

Silently there, and heap the snow with breath

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Rapid and strong, but silently! Its home

The voiceless lightning in these solitudes

Keeps innocently, and like vapour broods

Over the snow. The secret strength of things

Which governs thought, and to the infinite dome

Of heaven is as a law, inhabits thee!

And what were thou, and earth, and stars, and sea,

If to the human mind’s imaginings

Silence and solitude were vacancy?

Switzerland

,

June 23, 1816

.

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MISCELLANEOUS POEMS.

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ON THE MEDUSA OF LEONARDO DA VINCI,
IN THE FLORENTINE GALLERY.

It lieth, gazing on the midnight sky,

Upon the cloudy mountain peak supine;

Below, far lands are seen tremblingly;

Its horror and its beauty are divine.

Upon its lips and eyelids seem to lie

Loveliness like a shadow, from which shrine,

Fiery and lurid, struggling underneath,

The agonies of anguish and of death.

Yet it is less the horror than the grace

Which turns the gazer’s spirit into stone;

Whereon the lineaments of that dead face

Are graven, till the characters be grown

Into itself, and thought no more can trace;

’Tis the melodious hue of beauty thrown

Athwart the darkness and the glare of pain,

Which humanize and harmonize the strain.

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And from its head as from one body grow,

As [] grass out of a watery rock,

Hairs which are vipers, and they curl and flow

And their long tangles in each other lock,

And with unending involutions shew

Their mailed radiance, as it were to mock

The torture and the death within, and saw

The solid air with many a ragged jaw.

And from a stone beside a poisonous eft

Peeps idly into those Gorgonian eyes;

Whilst in the air a ghastly bat, bereft

Of sense, has flitted with a mad surprise

Out of the cave this hideous light had cleft,

And he comes hastening like a moth that hies

After a taper; and the midnight sky

Flares, a light more dread than obscurity.

’Tis the tempestuous loveliness of terror;

For from the serpents gleams a brazen glare

Kindled by that inextricable error,

Which makes a thrilling vapour of the air

Become a [] and evershifting mirror

Of all the beauty and the terror there—

A woman’s countenance, with serpent locks,

Gazing in death on heaven from those wet rocks.

Florence

,

1819

.

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SONG.

Rarely, rarely, comest thou,

Spirit of Delight!

Wherefore hast thou left me now

Many a day and night?

Many a weary night and day

’Tis since thou art fled away.

How shall ever one like me

Win thee back again?

With the joyous and the free

Thou wilt scoff at pain.

Spirit false! thou hast forgot

All but those who need thee not.

As a lizard with the shade

Of a trembling leaf,

Thou with sorrow art dismayed;

Even the sighs of grief

Reproach thee, that thou art not near,

And reproach thou wilt not hear.

Let me set my mournful ditty

To a merry measure,

Thou wilt never come for pity,

Thou wilt come for pleasure,

Pity then will cut away

Those cruel wings, and thou wilt stay.

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I love all that thou lovest,

Spirit of Delight!

The fresh Earth in new leaves drest,

And the starry night;

Autumn evening, and the morn

When the golden mists are born.

I love snow, and all the forms

Of the radiant frost;

I love waves, and winds, and storms,

Every thing almost

Which is Nature’s, and may be

Untainted by man’s misery.

I love tranquil solitude,

And such society

As is quiet, wise and good;

Between thee and me

What difference? but thou dost possess

The things I seek, not love them less.

I love Love—though he has wings,

And like light can flee,

But above all other things,

Spirit, I love thee—

Thou art love and life! O come,

Make once more my heart thy home.

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TO CONSTANTIA,
SINGING.

Thus to be lost and thus to sink and die,

Perchance were death indeed!—Constantia, turn!

In thy dark eyes a power like light doth lie,

Even though the sounds which were thy voice, which burn

Between thy lips, are laid to sleep;

Within thy breath, and on thy hair, like odour it is yet,

And from thy touch like fire doth leap.

Even while I write, my burning cheeks are wet,

Alas, that the torn heart can bleed, but not forget!

A breathless awe, like the swift change

Unseen, but felt in youthful slumbers,

Wild, sweet, but uncommunicably strange,

Thou breathest now in fast ascending numbers.

The cope of heaven seems rent and cloven

By the inchantment of thy strain,

And on my shoulders wings are woven,

To follow its sublime career,

Beyond the mighty moons that wane

Upon the verge of nature’s utmost sphere,

’Till the world’s shadowy walls are past and disappear.

Her voice is hovering o’er my soul—it lingers

O’ershadowing it with soft and lulling wings,

The blood and life within those snowy fingers

Teach witchcraft to the instrumental strings.

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My brain is wild, my breath comes quick—

The blood is listening in my frame,

And thronging shadows, fast and thick,

Fall on my overflowing eyes;

My heart is quivering like a flame;

As morning dew, that in the sunbeam dies,

I am dissolved in these consuming extacies.

I have no life, Constantia, now, but thee,

Whilst, like the world-surrounding air, thy song

Flows on, and fills all things with melody.—

Now is thy voice a tempest swift and strong,

On which, like one is trance upborne,

Secure o’er rocks and waves I sweep,

Rejoicing like a cloud of morn.

Now ’tis the breath of summer night,

Which when the starry waters sleep,

Round western isles, with incense-blossoms bright,

Lingering, suspends my soul in its voluptuous flight.

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THE FUGITIVES.

I.

The waters are flashing,

The white hail is dashing,

The lightnings are glancing,

The hoar-spray is dancing—

Away!

The whirlwind is rolling,

The thunder is tolling,

The forest is swinging,

The minster bells ringing—

Come away!

The Earth is like Ocean,

Wreck-strewn and in motion:

Bird, beast, man and worm

Have crept out of the storm—

Come away!

II.

“Our boat has one sail,

And the helmsman is pale;—

A bold pilot I trow,

Who should follow us now,”—

Shouted He—

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And she cried: “Ply the oar!

Put off gaily from shore!”—

As she spoke, bolts of death

Mixed with hail, specked their path

O’er the sea.

And from isle, tower and rock,

The blue beacon cloud broke,

And though dumb in the blast,

The red cannon flashed fast

From the lee.

III.

“And, fear’st thou, and fear’st thou?

And, see’st thou, and hear’st thou?

And, drive we not free

O’er the terrible sea,

I and thou?”

One boat-cloak did cover

The loved and the lover—

Their blood beats one measure,

They murmur proud pleasure

Soft and low;—

While around the lashed Ocean,

Like mountains in motion,

Is withdrawn and uplifted,

Sunk, shattered and shifted

To and fro.

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IV.

In the court of the fortress

Beside the pale portress,

Like a blood-hound well beaten,

The bridegroom stands, eaten

By shame;

On the topmost watch-turret,

As a death-boding spirit,

Stands the grey tyrant father,

To his voice the mad weather

Seems tame;

And with curses as wild

As ere clung to child,

He devotes to the blast

The best, loveliest and last

Of his name!

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A LAMENT.

Swifter far than summer’s flight,

Swifter far than youth’s delight,

Swifter far than happy night,

Art thou come and gone:

As the earth when leaves are dead,

As the night when sleep is sped,

As the heart when joy is fled,

I am left lone, alone.

The swallow Summer comes again.

The owlet Night resumes her reign,

But the wild swan Youth is fain

To fly with thee, false as thou.

My heart each day desires the morrow,

Sleep itself is turned to sorrow,

Vainly would my winter borrow

Sunny leaves from any bough.

Lilies for a bridal bed,

Roses for a matron’s head,

Violets for a maiden dead,

Pansies let my flowers be:

On the living grave I bear,

Scatter them without a tear,

Let no friend, however dear,

Waste one hope, one fear for me.

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THE PINE FOREST
OF THE CASCINE, NEAR PISA.

Dearest, best and brightest,

Come away,

To the woods and to the fields!

Dearer than this fairest day,

Which like thee to those in sorrow,

Comes to bid a sweet good-morrow

To the rough year just awake

In its cradle in the brake.

The eldest of the hours of spring,

Into the winter wandering,

Looks upon the leafless wood;

And the banks all bare and rude

Found it seems this halcyon morn,

In February’s bosom born,

Bending from heaven, in azure mirth,

Kissed the cold forehead of the earth,

And smiled upon the silent sea,

And bade the frozen streams be free;

And waked to music all the fountains,

And breathed upon the rigid mountains,

And made the wintry world appear

Like one on whom thou smilest, dear.

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Radiant Sister of the Day,

Awake! arise! and come away!

To the wild woods and the plains,

To the pools where winter rains

Image all the roof of leaves,

Where the Pine its garland weaves,

Sapless, grey, and ivy dun

Round stones that never kiss the sun,

To the sandhills of the sea,

Where the earliest violets be.

Now the last day of many days,

All beautiful and bright as thou,

The loveliest and the last, is dead,

Rise Memory, and write its praise,

And do thy wonted work and trace

The epitaph of glory fled:

For the Earth hath changed its face,

A frown is on the Heaven’s brow.

We wandered to the Pine Forest

That skirts the Ocean’s foam,

The lighest wind was in its nest,

The tempest in its home.

The whispering waves were half asleep,

The clouds were gone to play,

And on the woods, and on the deep,

The smile of Heaven lay.

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It seemed as if the day were one

Sent from beyond the skies,

Which shed to earth above the sun

A light of Paradise.

We paused amid the Pines that stood

The giants of the waste,

Tortured by storms to shapes as rude,

With stems like serpents interlaced.

How calm it was—the silence there

By such a chain was bound,

That even the busy woodpecker

Made stiller by her sound

The inviolable quietness;

The breath of peace we drew,

With its soft motion made not less

The calm that round us grew.

It seemed that from the remotest seat

Of the white mountain’s waste,

To the bright flower beneath our feet,

A magic circle traced;—

A spirit interfused around,

A thinking silent life,

To momentary peace it bound

Our mortal Nature’s strife.—

For still it seemed the centre of

The magic circle there,

Was one whose being filled with love

The breathless atmosphere.

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Were not the crocusses that grew

Under that ilex tree,

As beautiful in scent and hue

As ever fed the bee?

We stood beside the pools that lie

Under the forest bough,

And each seemed like a sky

Gulphed in a world below;—

A purple firmament of light,

Which in the dark earth lay,

More boundless than the depth of night,

And clearer than the day—

In which the massy forests grew,

As in the upper air,

More perfect both in shape and hue

Than any waving there.

Like one beloved, the scene had lent

To the dark water’s breast

Its every leaf and lineament

With that clear truth expressed.

There lay far glades and neighbouring lawn,

And through the dark green crowd

The white sun twinkling like the dawn

Under a speckled cloud.

Sweet views, which in our world above

Can never well be seen,

Were imaged by the water’s love

Of that fair forest green.

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And all was interfused beneath

Within an Elysium air,

An atmosphere without a breath,

A silence sleeping there.

Until a wandering wind crept by,

Like an unwelcome thought,

Which from my mind’s too faithful eye

Blots thy bright image out.

For thou art good and dear and kind,

The forest ever green,

But less of peace in S—’s mind,

Than calm in waters seen.

February 2, 1822

.

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TO NIGHT.

Swiftly walk over the western wave,

Spirit of Night!

Out of the misty eastern cave,

Where, all the long and lone daylight,

Thou wovest dreams of joy and fear,

Which make thee terrible and dear,—

Swift be thy flight!

Wrap thy form in a mantle grey,

Star-inwrought!

Blind with thine hair the eyes of day,

Kiss her until she be wearied out,

Then wander o’er city, and sea, and land,

Touching all with thine opiate wand—

Come, long sought!

When I arose and saw the dawn,

I sighed for thee;

When light rode high, and the dew was gone,

And noon lay heavy on flower and tree,

And the weary Day turned to his rest,

Lingering like an unloved guest,

I sighed for thee.

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Thy brother Death came, and cried,

Wouldst thou me?

Thy sweet child Sleep, the filmy-eyed,

Murmured like a noon-tide bee,

Shall I nestle near thy side?

Wouldst thou me?—And I replied,

No, not thee!

Death will come when thou art dead,

Soon, too soon—

Sleep will come when thou art fled,

Of neither would I ask the boon

I ask of thee, beloved Night—

Swift be thine approaching flight,

Come soon, soon!

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EVENING.
PONTE A MARE, PISA.

The sun is set; the swallows are asleep;

The bats are flitting fast in the grey air;

The slow soft toads out of damp corners creep,

And evening’s breath, wandering here and there

Over the quivering surface of the stream,

Wakes not one ripple from its silent dream.

There is no dew on the dry grass to-night,

Nor damp within the shadow of the trees;

The wind is intermitting, dry, and light;

And in the inconstant motion of the breeze

The dust and straws are driven up and down,

And whirled about the pavement of the town.

Within the surface of the fleeting river

The wrinkled image of the city lay,

Immoveably unquiet, and for ever

It trembles, but it never fades away;

Go to the []

You, being changed, will find it then as now.

The chasm in which the sun has sunk is shut

By darkest barriers of enormous cloud,

Like mountain over mountain huddled—but

Growing and moving upwards in a crowd,

And over it a space of watery blue,

Which the keen evening star is shining through.

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ARETHUSA.

Arethusa arose

From her couch of snows

In the Acroceraunian mountains,—

From cloud and from crag,

With many a jag,

Shepherding her bright fountains.

She leapt down the rocks

With her rainbow locks

Streaming among the streams;—

Her steps paved with green

The downward ravine

Which slopes to the western gleams:

And gliding and springing,

She went, ever singing,

In murmurs as soft as sleep;

The Earth seemed to love her,

And Heaven smiled above her,

As she lingered towards the deep.

Then Alpheus bold,

On his glacier cold,

With his trident the mountains strook;

And opened a chasm

In the rocks;—with the spasm

All Erymanthus shook.

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And the black south wind

It concealed behind

The urns of the silent snow,

And earthquake and thunder

Did rend in sunder

The bars of the springs below:

The beard and the hair

Of the river God were

Seen through the torrent’s sweep,

As he followed the light

Of the fleet nymph’s flight

To the brink of the Dorian deep.

“Oh, save me! Oh, guide me!

And bid the deep hide me,

For he grasps me now by the hair!”

The loud Ocean heard,

To its blue depth stirred,

And divided at her prayer;

And under the water

The Earth’s white daughter

Fled like a sunny beam,

Behind her descended,

Her billows unblended

With the brackish Dorian stream:—

Like a gloomy stain

On the emerald main

Alpheus rushed behind,—

As an eagle pursuing

A dove to its ruin

Down the streams of the cloudy wind.

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Under the bowers

Where the Ocean Powers

Sit on their pearled thrones,

Through the coral woods

Of the weltering floods,

Over heaps of unvalued stones:

Through the dim beams

Which amid the streams

Weave a net-work of coloured light;

And under the caves,

Where the shadowy waves

Are as green as the forest’s night:—

Outspeeding the shark,

And the sword-fish dark,

Under the ocean foam,

And up through the rifts

Of the mountain clifts

They passed to their Dorian home.

And now from their fountains

In Enna’s mountains,

Down one vale where the morning basks,

Like friends once parted

Grown single-hearted,

They ply their watery tasks.

At sun-rise they leap

From their cradles steep

In the cave of the shelving hill;

At noon-tide they flow

Through the woods below

And the meadows of Asphodel;

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And at night they sleep

In the rocking deep

Beneath the Ortygian shore;—

Like spirits that lie

In the azure sky

When they love but live no more.

Pisa

,

1820

.

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THE QUESTION.

I dreamed that, as I wandered by the way,

Bare winter suddenly was changed to spring,

And gentle odours led my steps astray,

Mixed with a sound of waters murmuring

Along a shelving bank of turf, which lay

Under a copse, and hardly dared to fling

Its green arms round the bosom of the stream,

But kissed it and then fled, as thou mightest in dream.

There grew pied wind-flowers and violets,

Daisies, those pearled Arcturi of the earth,

The constellated flower that never sets;

Faint oxlips; tender bluebells, at whose birth

The sod scarce heaved; and that tall flower that wets

Its mother’s face with heaven-collected tears,

When the low wind, its playmate’s voice, it hears.

And in the warm hedge grew lush eglantine,

Green cow-bind and the moonlight-coloured May,

And cherry blossoms, and white cups, whose wine

Was the bright dew yet drained not by the day;

And wild roses, and ivy serpentine,

With its dark buds and leaves, wandering astray;

And flowers azure, black and streaked with gold,

Fairer than any wakened eyes behold.

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And nearer to the river’s trembling edge

There grew broad flag flowers, purple prankt with white,

And starry river buds among the sedge,

And floating water-lilies, broad and bright,

Which lit the oak that overhung the hedge

With moonlight beams of their own watery light;

And bulrushes, and reeds of such deep green

As soothed the dazzled eye with sober sheen.

Methought that of these visionary flowers

I made a nosegay, bound in such a way

That the same hues, which in their natural bowers

Were mingled or opposed, the like array

Kept these imprisoned children of the Hours

Within my hand,—and then, elate and gay,

I hastened to the spot whence I had come,

That I might there present it!—Oh! to whom?

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LINES TO AN INDIAN AIR.

I arise from dreams of thee

In the first sweet sleep of night,

When the winds are breathing low,

And the stars are shining bright:

I arise from dreams of thee,

And a spirit in my feet

Has led me—who knows how?

To thy chamber window, sweet!

The wandering airs they faint

On the dark, the silent stream—

The champak odours fail

Like sweet thoughts in a dream;

The nightingale’s complaint,

It dies upon her heart,

As I must on thine,

Beloved as thou art!

O lift me from the grass!

I die, I faint, I fail!

Let thy love in kisses rain

On my lips and eyelids pale.

My cheek is cold and white, alas!

My heart beats loud and fast,

Oh! press it close to thine again,

Where it will break at last.

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STANZAS
WRITTEN IN DEJECTION, NEAR NAPLES.

The sun is warm, the sky is clear,

The waves are dancing fast and bright,

Blue isles and snowy mountains wear

The purple noon’s transparent light

Around its unexpanded buds;

Like many a voice of one delight,

The winds, the birds, the ocean floods,

The City’s voice itself is soft, like Solitude’s.

I see the Deep’s untrampled floor

With green and purple seaweeds strown;

I see the waves upon the shore,

Like light dissolved in star-showers, thrown:

I sit upon the sands alone,

The lightning of the noon-tide ocean

Is flashing round me, and a tone

Arises from its measured motion,

How sweet! did any heart now share in my emotion.

Alas! I have nor hope nor health,

Nor peace within nor calm around,

Nor that content surpassing wealth

The sage in meditation found,

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And walked with inward glory crowned—

Nor fame, nor power, nor love, nor leisure.

Others I see whom these surround—

Smiling they live and call life pleasure;—

To me that cup has been dealt in another measure.

Yet now despair itself is mild,

Even as the winds and waters are;

I could lie down like a tired child,

And weep away the life of care

Which I have borne and yet must bear,

Till death like sleep might steal on me,

And I might feel in the warm air

My cheek grow cold, and hear the sea

Breathe o’er my dying brain its last monotony.

Some might lament that I were cold,

As I, when this sweet day is gone,

Which my lost heart, too soon grown old,

Insults with this untimely moan;

They might lament—for I am one

Whom men love not,—and yet regret,

Unlike this day, which, when the sun

Shall on its stainless glory set,

Will linger, though enjoyed, like joy in memory yet.

December, 1818

.

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AUTUMN:
A DIRGE.

The warm sun is failing, the bleak wind is wailing,

The bare boughs are sighing, the pale flowers are dying,

And the year

On the earth her death-bed, in a shroud of leaves dead,

Is lying.

Come, months, come away,

From November to May,

In your saddest array;

Follow the bier

Of the dead cold year,

And like dim shadows watch by her sepulchre.

The chill rain is falling, the nipt worm is crawling,

The rivers are swelling, the thunder is knelling

For the year;

The blithe swallows are flown, and the lizards each gone

To his dwelling;

Come, months, come away;

Put on white, black, and grey,

Let your light sisters play—

Ye, follow the bier

Of the dead cold year,

And make her grave green with tear on tear.

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HYMN OF APOLLO.

The sleepless Hours who watch me as I lie,

Curtained with star-enwoven tapestries,

From the broad moonlight of the sky,

Fanning the busy dreams from my dim eyes,—

Waken me when their Mother, the grey Dawn,

Tells them that dreams and that the moon is gone.

Then I arise, and climbing Heaven’s blue dome,

I walk over the mountains and the waves,

Leaving my robe upon the ocean foam;

My footsteps pave the clouds with fire; the caves

Are filled with my bright presence, and the air

Leaves the green earth to my embraces bare.

The sunbeams are my shafts, with which I kill

Deceit, that loves the night and fears the day;

All men who do or even imagine ill

Fly me, and from the glory of my ray

Good minds and open actions take new might,

Until diminished by the reign of night.

I feed the clouds, the rainbows and the flowers

With their ethereal colours; the Moon’s globe

And the pure stars in their eternal bowers

Are cinctured with my power as with a robe;

Whatever lamps on Earth or Heaven may shine,

Are portions of one power, which is mine.

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I stand at noon upon the peak of Heaven,

Then with unwilling steps I wander down

Into the clouds of the Atlantic even;

For grief that I depart they weep and frown:

What look is more delightful than the smile

With which I soothe them from the western isle?

I am the eye with which the Universe

Beholds itself and knows itself divine;

All harmony of instrument or verse,

All prophesy, all medicine are mine,

All light of art or nature;—to my song,

Victory and praise in their own right belong.

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HYMN OF PAN.

From the forests and highlands

We come, we come;

From the river-girt islands,

Where loud waves are dumb

Listening to my sweet pipings.

The wind in the reeds and the rushes,

The bees on the bells of thyme,

The birds on the myrtle bushes,

The cicale above in the lime,

And the lizards below in the grass,

Were as silent as ever old Tmolus* was,

Listening to my sweet pipings.

Liquid Peneus was flowing,

And all dark Tempe lay

In Pelion’s shadow, outgrowing

The light of the dying day,

Speeded by my sweet pipings.

The Sileni, and Sylvans, and Fauns,

And the Nymphs of the woods and waves,

To the edge of the moist river-lawns,

And the brink of the dewy caves,

And all that did then attend and follow

Were silent with love, as you now, Apollo,

With envy of my sweet pipings.

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I sang of the dancing stars,

I sang of the dædal Earth,

And of Heaven—and the giant wars,

And Love, and Death, and Birth,—

And then I changed my pipings,—

Singing how down the vale of Menalus

I pursued a maiden and clasped a reed:

Gods and men, we are all deluded thus!

It breaks in our bosom and then we bleed:

All wept, as I think both ye now would,

If envy or age had not frozen your blood,

At the sorrow of my sweet pipings.

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THE BOAT
ON THE SERCHIO.

Our boat is asleep in Serchio’s stream,

Its sails are folded like thoughts in a dream,

The helm sways idly, hither and thither;

Dominic, the boat-man, has brought the mast,

And the oars and the sails; but ’tis sleeping fast,

Like a beast, unconscious of its tether.

The stars burnt out in the pale blue air,

And the thin white moon lay withering there,

To tower, and cavern, and rift and tree,

The owl and the bat fled drowsily.

Day had kindled the dewy woods,

And the rocks above and the stream below,

And the vapours in their multitudes,

And the Apennine’s shroud of summer snow,

And clothed with light of aery gold

The mists in their eastern caves uprolled.

Day had awakened all things that be,

The lark and the thrush and the swallow free,

And the milkmaid’s song and the mower’s scythe,

And the matin-bell and the mountain bee:

Fire-flies were quenched on the dewy corn,

Glow-worms went out on the river’s brim,

Like lamps which a student forgets to trim:

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The beetle forgot to wind his horn,

The crickets were still in the meadow and hill:

Like a flock of rooks at a farmer’s gun

Night’s dreams and terrors, every one,

Fled from the brains which are their prey,

From the lamp’s death to the morning ray:

All rose to do the task He set to each,

Who shaped us to his ends and not our own;

The million rose to learn, and one to teach

What none yet ever knew or can be known;

And many rose

Whose woe was such that fear became desire;—

Melchior and Lionel were not among those;

They from the throng of men had stepped aside,

And made their home under the green hill side.

It was that hill, whose intervening brow

Screens Lucca from the Pisan’s envious eye,

Which the circumfluous plain waving below,

Like a wide lake of green fertility,

With streams and fields and marshes bare,

Divides from the far Apennines—which lie

Islanded in the immeasurable air.

“What think you, as she lies in her green cove,

Our little sleeping boat is dreaming of?

If morning dreams are true, why I should guess

That she was dreaming of our idleness,

And of the miles of watery way

We should have led her by this time of day?”—

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—“Never mind,” said Lionel,

“Give care to the winds, they can bear it well

About yon poplar tops; and see

The white clouds are driving merrily,

And the stars we miss this morn will light

More willingly our return to-night.—

List, my dear fellow, the breeze blows fair;

How it scatters Dominic’s long black hair,

Singing of us, and our lazy motions,

If I can guess a boat’s emotions.—”

The chain is loosed, the sails are spread,

The living breath is fresh behind,

As with dews and sunrise fed,

Comes the laughing morning wind;—

The sails are full, the boat makes head

Against the Serchio’s torrent fierce,

Then flags with intermitting course,

And hangs upon the wave, []

Which fervid from its mountain source

Shallow, smooth and strong doth come,—

Swift as fire, tempestuously

It sweeps into the affrighted sea;

In morning’s smile its eddies coil,

Its billows sparkle, toss and boil,

Torturing all its quiet light

Into columns fierce and bright.

The Serchio, twisting forth

Between the marble barriers which it clove

At Ripafratta, leads through the dread chasm

The wave that died the death which lovers love,

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Living in what it sought; as if this spasm

Had not yet past, the toppling mountains cling,

But the clear stream in full enthusiasm

Pours itself on the plain, until wandering,

Down one clear path of effluence chrystalline

Sends its clear waves, that they may fling

At Arno’s feet tribute of corn and wine,

Then, through the pestilential desarts wild

Of tangled marsh and woods of stunted fir,

It rushes to the Ocean.

July, 1821

.

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THE ZUCCA.*

I.

Summer was dead and Autumn was expiring,

And infant Winter laughed upon the land

All cloudlessly and cold;—when I, desiring

More in this world than any understand,

Wept o’er the beauty, which like sea retiring,

Had left the earth bare as the wave-worn sand

Of my poor heart, and o’er the grass and flowers

Pale for the falsehood of the flattering hours.

II.

Summer was dead, but I yet lived to weep

The instability of all but weeping;

And on the earth lulled in her winter sleep

I woke, and envied her as she was sleeping.

Too happy Earth! over thy face shall creep

The wakening vernal airs, until thou, leaping

From unremembered dreams, shalt [] see

No death divide thy immortality.

III.

I loved—O no, I mean not one of ye,

Or any earthly one, though ye are dear

As human heart to human heart may be;—

I loved, I know not what—but this low sphere

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And all that it contains, contains not thee,

Thou, whom seen no where, I feel everywhere,

Dim object of my soul’s idolatry.

Veiled art thou like—

IV.

By Heaven and Earth, from all whose shapes thou flowest,

Neither to be contained, delayed, or hidden,

Making divine the loftiest and the lowest,

When for a moment thou art not forbidden

To live within the life which thou bestowest;

And leaving noblest things vacant and chidden,

Cold as a corpse after the spirit’s flight,

Blank as the sun after the birth of night.

V.

In winds, and trees, and streams, and all things common,

In music and the sweet unconscious tone

Of animals, and voices which are human,

Meant to express some feelings of their own;

In the soft motions and rare smile of woman,

In flowers and leaves, and in the fresh grass shewn,

Or dying in the autumn, I the most

Adore thee present or lament thee lost.

VI.

And thus I went, lamenting when I saw

A plant upon the river’s margin lie,

Like one who loved beyond his Nature’s law,

And in despair had cast him down to die;

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Its leaves which had outlived the frost, the thaw

Had blighted as a heart which hatred’s eye

Can blast not, but which pity kills; the dew

Lay on its spotted leaves like tears too true.

VII.

The Heavens had wept upon it, but the Earth

Had crushed it on her unmaternal breast.

* * * * * * *

VIII.

I bore it to my chamber, and I planted

It in a vase full of the lightest mould;

The winter beams which out of Heaven slanted

Fell through the window panes, disrobed of cold,

Upon its leaves and flowers; the star which panted

In evening for the Day, whose car has rolled

Over the horizon’s wave, with looks of light

Smiled on it from the threshold of the night.

IX.

The mitigated influences of air

And light revived the plant, and from it grew

Strong leaves and tendrils, and its flowers fair,

Full as a cup with the vine’s burning dew,

O’erflowed with golden colours; an atmosphere

Of vital warmth infolded it anew,

And every impulse sent to every part

The unbeheld pulsations of its heart.

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X.

Well might the plant grow beautiful and strong,

Even if the sun and air had smiled not on it;

For one wept o’er it all the winter long

Tears pure as Heaven’s rain, which fell upon it

Hour after hour; for sounds of softest song

Mixed with the stringed melodies that won it

To leave the gentle lips on which it slept,

Had loosed the heart of him who sat and wept.

XI.

Had loosed his heart, and shook the leaves and flowers

On which he wept, the while the savage storm

Waked by the darkest of December’s hours

Was raving round the chamber hushed and warm;

The birds were shivering in their leafless bowers,

The fish were frozen in the pools, the form

Of every summer plant was dead []

Whilst this * * *

January, 1822

.

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THE TWO SPIRITS.
AN ALLEGORY.

first spirit.

Oh thou, who plumed with strong desire

Would float above the earth, beware!

A Shadow tracks thy flight of fire—

Night is coming!

Bright are the regions of the air,

And among the winds and beams

It were delight to wander there—

Night is coming!

second spirit.

The deathless stars are bright above;

If I would cross the shade of night,

Within my heart is the lamp of love,

And that is day!

And the moon will smile with gentle light

On my golden plumes where’er they move;

The meteors will linger round my flight

And make night day.

first spirit.

But if the whirlwinds of darkness waken

Hail and lightning and stormy rain;

See the bounds of the air are shaken—

Night is coming!

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The red swift clouds of the hurricane

Yon declining sun have overtaken,

The clash of the hail sweeps over the plain—

Night is coming!

second spirit.

I see the light, and I hear the sound;

I’ll sail on the flood of the tempest dark

With the calm within and the light around

Which makes night day:

And thou, when the gloom is deep and stark,

Look from thy dull earth, slumber-bound,

My moon-like flight thou then may’st mark

On high, far away.

Some say, there is a precipice

Where one vast pine is frozen to ruin

O’er piles of snow and chasms of ice

Mid Alpine mountains;

And that the languid storm pursuing

That winged shape for ever flies

Round those hoar branches, aye renewing

Its aery fountains.

Some say, when nights are dry and clear,

And the death dews sleep on the morass,

Sweet whispers are heard by the traveller

Which makes night day:

And a silver shape like his early love doth pass

Upborne by her wild and glittering hair,

And when he awakes on the fragrant grass,

He finds night day.

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A FRAGMENT.

They were two cousins, almost like to twins,

Except that from the catalogue of sins

Nature had razed their love—which could not be

But by dissevering their nativity.

And so they grew together, like two flowers

Upon one stem, which the same beams and showers

Lull or awaken in their purple prime,

Which the same hand will gather—the same clime

Shake with decay. This fair day smiles to see

All those who love,—and who ever loved like thee,

Fiordispina? Scarcely Cosimo,

Within whose bosom and whose brain now glow

The ardours of a vision which obscure

The very idol of its portraiture;

He faints, dissolved into a sense of love;

But thou art as a planet sphered above,

But thou art Love itself—ruling the motion

Of his subjected spirit—such emotion

Must end in sin or sorrow, if sweet May

Had not brought forth this morn—your wedding day.

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A BRIDAL SONG.

The golden gates of sleep unbar

Where strength and beauty met together,

Kindle their image like a star

In a sea of glassy weather.

Night, with all thy stars look down,—

Darkness, weep thy holiest dew,—

Never smiled the inconstant moon

On a pair so true.

Let eyes not see their own delight;—

Haste, swift Hour, and thy flight

Oft renew.

Fairies, sprites, and angels keep her!

Holy stars, permit no wrong!

And return to wake the sleeper,

Dawn,—ere it be long.

Oh joy! oh fear! what will be done

In the absence of the sun!

Come along!

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THE SUNSET.

There late was One within whose subtle being,

As light and wind within some delicate cloud

That fades amid the blue noon’s burning sky,

Genius and youth contended. None may know

The sweetness of the joy which made his breath

Fail, like the trances of the summer air,

When, with the Lady of his love, who then

First knew the unreserve of mingled being,

He walked along the pathway of a field

Which to the east a hoar wood shadowed o’er,

But to the west was open to the sky.

There now the sun had sunk, but lines of gold

Hung on the ashen clouds, and on the points

Of the far level grass and nodding flowers

And the old dandelion’s hoary beard,

And, mingled with the shades of twilight, lay

On the brown massy woods—and in the east

The broad and burning moon lingeringly rose

Between the black trunks of the crowded trees,

While the faint stars were gathering overhead.—

“Is it not strange, Isabel,” said the youth,

“I never saw the sun? We will walk here

To-morrow; thou shalt look on it with me.”

That night the youth and lady mingled lay

In love and sleep—but when the morning came

The lady found her lover dead and cold.

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Let none believe that God in mercy gave

That stroke. The lady died not, nor grew wild,

But year by year lived on—in truth I think

Her gentleness and patience and sad smiles,

And that she did not die, but lived to tend

Her aged father, were a kind of madness,

If madness ’tis to be unlike the world.

For but to see her were to read the tale

Woven by some subtlest bard, to make hard hearts

Dissolve away in wisdom-working grief;—

Her eyelashes were worn away with tears,

Her lips and cheeks were like things dead—so pale;

Her hands were thin, and through their wandering veins

And weak articulations might be seen

Day’s ruddy light. The tomb of thy dead self

Which one vexed ghost inhabits, night and day,

Is all, lost child, that now remains of thee!

“Inheritor of more than earth can give,

Passionless, calm and silence unreproved,

Whether the dead find, oh, not sleep! but rest,

And are the uncomplaining things they seem,

Or live, or drop in the deep sea of Love;

Oh, that like thine, mine epitaph were—Peace!”

This was the only moan she ever made.

1816

.

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SONG,
ON A FADED VIOLET.

The odour from the flower is gone,

Which like thy kisses breathed on me;

The colour from the flower is flown,

Which glowed of thee, and only thee!

A shrivelled, lifeless, vacant form,

It lies on my abandoned breast,

And mocks the heart which yet is warm

With cold and silent rest.

I weep—my tears revive it not!

I sigh—it breathes no more on me;

Its mute and uncomplaining lot

Is such as mine should be.

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LINES TO A CRITIC.

Honey from silk-worms who can gather,

Or silk from the yellow bee?

The grass may grow in winter weather

As soon as hate in me.

Hate men who cant, and men who pray,

And men who rail like thee;

An equal passion to repay

They are not coy like me.

Or seek some slave of power and gold,

To be thy dear heart’s mate;

Thy love will move that bigot cold,

Sooner than me, thy hate.

A passion like the one I prove

Cannot divided be;

I hate thy want of truth and love—

How should I then hate thee?

December, 1817

.

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GOOD NIGHT.

Good night? ah! no; the hour is ill

Which severs those it should unite;

Let us remain together still,

Then it will be good night.

How can I call the lone night good,

Though thy sweet wishes wing its flight?

Be it not said, thought, understood,

Then it will be good night.

To hearts which near each other move

From evening close to morning light,

The night is good; because, my love,

They never say good night.

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TO-MORROW.

Where art thou, beloved, To-morrow?

Whom young and old and strong and weak,

Rich and poor, through joy and sorrow,

Thy sweet smiles we ever seek,—

In thy place—ah! well-a-day!

We find the thing we fled—To-day.

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DEATH.

They die—the dead return not—Misery

Sits near an open grave and calls them over,

A Youth with hoary hair and haggard eye—

They are the names of kindred, friend, and lover,

Which he so feebly called—they all are gone!

Fond wretch, all dead, those vacant names alone,

This most familiar scene, my pain—

These tombs alone remain.

Misery, my sweetest friend—oh! weep no more!

Thou wilt not be consoled—I wonder not!

For I have seen thee from thy dwelling’s door

Watch the calm sunset with them, and this spot

Was even as bright and calm, but transitory,

And now thy hopes are gone, thy hair is hoary;

This most familiar scene, my pain—

These tombs alone remain.

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A LAMENT.

Oh, world! oh, life! oh, time!

On whose last steps I climb

Trembling at that where I had stood before;

When will return the glory of your prime?

No more—O, never more!

Out of the day and night

A joy has taken flight;

Fresh spring, and summer, and winter hoar,

Move my faint heart with grief, but with delight

No more—O, never more!

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LOVE’S PHILOSOPHY.

The fountains mingle with the river,

And the rivers with the ocean,

The winds of heaven mix for ever

With a sweet emotion;

Nothing in the world is single;

All things by a law divine

In one another’s being mingle—

Why not I with thine?

See the mountains kiss high heaven,

And the waves clasp one another;

No sister flower would be forgiven

If it disdained its brother:

And the sunlight clasps the earth,

And the moonbeams kiss the sea,

What are all these kissings worth,

If thou kiss not me?

January, 1820

.

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TO E*** V***

Madonna, wherefore hast thou sent to me

Sweet basil and mignionette?

Embleming love and health, which never yet

In the same wreath might be.

Alas, and they are wet!

Is it with thy kisses or thy tears?

For never rain or dew

Such flagrance drew

From plant or flower—the very doubt endears

My sadness ever new,

The sighs I breathe, the tears I shed for thee.

March, 1821

.

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TO —

I fear thy kisses, gentle maiden,

Thou needest not fear mine;

My spirit is too deeply laden

Ever to burthen thine.

I fear thy mien, thy tones, thy motion,

Thou needest not fear mine;

Innocent is the heart’s devotion

With which I worship thine.

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LINES.

When the lamp is shattered

The light in the dust lies dead—

When the cloud is scattered

The rainbow’s glory is shed.

When the lute is broken,

Sweet tones are remembered not;

When the lips have spoken,

Loved accents are soon forgot.

As music and splendour

Survive not the lamp and the lute,

The heart’s echoes render

No song when the spirit is mute:—

No song but sad dirges,

Like the wind through a ruined cell,

Or the mournful surges

That ring the dead seaman’s knell.

When hearts have once mingled

Love first leaves the well-built nest,

The weak one is singled

To endure what it once possest.

O, Love! who bewailest

The frailty of all things here,

Why choose you the frailest

For your cradle, your home and your bier?

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Its passions will rock thee

As the storms rock the ravens on high:

Bright reason will mock thee,

Like the sun from a wintry sky.

From thy nest every rafter

Will rot, and thine eagle home

Leave the naked to laughter,

When leaves fall and cold winds come.

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TO WILLIAM SHELLEY.

(With what truth I may say—

Roma! Roma! Roma!

Non è più come era prima!)

My lost William, thou in whom

Some bright spirit lived, and did

That decaying robe consume

Which its lustre faintly hid,

Here its ashes find a tomb,

But beneath this pyramid

Thou art not—if a thing divine

Like thee can die, thy funeral shrine

Is thy mother’s grief and mine.

Where art thou, my gentle child?

Let me think thy spirit feeds,

Within its life intense and mild,

The love of living leaves and weeds,

Among these tombs and ruins wild;—

Let me think that through low seeds

Of the sweet flowers and sunny grass,

Into their hues and scents may pass

A portion—

June, 1819

.

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AN ALLEGORY.

A portal as of shadowy adamant

Stands yawning on the highway of the life

Which we all tread, a cavern huge and gaunt;

Around it rages an unceasing strife

Of shadows, like the restless clouds that haunt

The gap of some cleft mountain, lifted high

Into the whirlwinds of the upper sky.

And many passed it by with careless tread,

Not knowing that a shadowy []

Tracks every traveller even to where the dead

Wait peacefully for their companion new;

But others, by more curious humour led,

Pause to examine,—these are very few,

And they learn little there, except to know

That shadows follow them where’er they go.

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MUTABILITY.

The flower that smiles to-day

To-morrow dies;

All that we wish to stay,

Tempts and then flies;

What is this world’s delight?

Lightning that mocks the night,

Brief even as bright.

Virtue, how frail it is!

Friendship too rare!

Love, how it sells poor bliss

For proud despair!

But we, though soon they fall,

Survive their joy and all

Which ours we call.

Whilst skies are blue and bright,

Whilst flowers are gay,

Whilst eyes that change ere night

Make glad the day;

Whilst yet the calm hours creep,

Dream thou—and from thy sleep

Then wake to weep.

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FROM THE ARABIC.
AN IMITATION.

My faint spirit was sitting in the light

Of thy looks, my love;

It panted for thee like the hind at noon

For the brooks, my love.

Thy barb whose hoofs outspeed the tempest’s flight

Bore thee far from me;

My heart, for my weak feet were weary soon,

Did companion thee.

Ah! fleeter far than fleetest storm or steed,

Or the death they bear,

The heart which tender thought clothes like a dove

With the wings of care;

In the battle, in the darkness, in the need,

Shall mine cling to thee,

Nor claim one smile for all the comfort, love,

It may bring to thee.

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TO —

One word is too often profaned

For me to profane it,

One feeling too falsely disdained

For thee to disdain it.

One hope is too like despair

For prudence to smother,

And Pity from thee more dear,

Than that from another.

I can give not what men call love,

But wilt thou accept not

The worship the heart lifts above

And the Heavens reject not,

The desire of the moth for the star,

Of the night for the morrow,

The devotion to something afar

From the sphere of our sorrow?

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MUSIC.

I pant for the music which is divine,

My heart in its thirst is a dying flower;

Pour forth the sound like enchanted wine,

Loosen the notes in a silver shower;

Like a herbless plain, for the gentle rain,

I gasp, I faint, till they wake again.

Let me drink of the spirit of that sweet sound,

More, O more,—I am thirsting yet,

It loosens the serpent which care has bound

Upon my heart to stifle it;

The dissolving strain, through every vein,

Passes into my heart and brain.

As the scent of a violet withered up,

Which grew by the brink of a silver lake;

When the hot noon has drained its dewy cup,

And mist there was none its thirst to slake—

And the violet lay dead while the odour flew

On the wings of the wind o’er the waters blue—

As one who drinks from a charmed cup

Of foaming, and sparkling and murmuring wine

Whom, a mighty Enchantress filling up,

Invites to love with her kiss divine.

* * * * *

* * * * *

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LINES.

The cold earth slept below;

Above the cold sky shone;

And all around,

With a chilling sound,

From caves of ice and fields of snow,

The breath of night like death did flow

Beneath the sinking moon.

The wintry hedge was black,

The green grass was not seen,

The birds did rest

On the bare thorn’s breast,

Whose roots, beside the pathway track,

Had bound their folds o’er many a crack

Which the frost had made between.

Thine eyes glowed in the glare

Of the moon’s dying light;

As a fen-fire’s beam,

On a sluggish stream,

Gleams dimly—so the moon shone there,

And it yellowed the strings of thy tangled hair

That shook in the wind of night.

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The moon made thy lips pale, beloved;

The wind made thy bosom chill;

The night did shed

On thy dear head

Its frozen dew, and thou didst lie

Where the bitter breath of the naked sky

Might visit thee at will.

November, 1815

.

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DEATH.

Death is here and death is there,

Death is busy every where,

All around, within, beneath,

Above is death—and we are death.

Death has set his mark and seal

On all we are and all we feel,

On all we know and all we fear,

* * * *

First our pleasures die—and then

Our hopes, and then our fears—and when

These are dead, the debt is due,

Dust claims dust—and we die too.

All things that we love and cherish,

Like ourselves must fade and perish,

Such is our rude mortal lot,

Love itself would, did they not.

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TO —

When passion’s trance is overpast,

If tenderness and truth could last

Or live, whilst all wild feelings keep

Some mortal slumber, dark and deep,

I should not weep, I should not weep!

It were enough to feel, to see

Thy soft eyes gazing tenderly,

And dream the rest—and burn and be

The secret food of fires unseen,

Couldst thou but be as thou hast been.

After the slumber of the year

The woodland violets re-appear,

All things revive in field or grove,

And sky and sea, but two, which move,

And for all others, life and love.

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PASSAGE OF THE APENNINES.

Listen, listen, Mary mine,

To the whisper of the Apennine,

It bursts on the roof like the thunder’s roar,

Or like the sea on a northern shore,

Heard in its raging ebb and flow

By the captives pent in the cave below.

The Apennine in the light of day

Is a mighty mountain dim and grey,

Which between the earth and sky doth lay;

But when night comes, a chaos dread

On the dim starlight then is spread,

And the Apennine walks abroad with the storm.

May 4th, 1818

.

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TO MARY —

Oh! Mary dear, that you were here

With your brown eyes bright and clear,

And your sweet voice, like a bird

Singing love to its lone mate

In the ivy bower disconsolate;

Voice the sweetest ever heard!

And your brow more * * *

Than the * * * sky

Of this azure Italy.

Mary dear, come to me soon,

I am not well whilst thou art far;

As sunset to the sphered moon,

As twilight to the western star,

Thou, beloved, art to me.

Oh! Mary dear, that you were here;

The Castle echo whispers “Here!”

Este

,

September 1818

.

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THE PAST.

Wilt thou forget the happy hours

Which we buried in Love’s sweet bowers,

Heaping over their corpses cold

Blossoms and leaves, instead of mould?

Blossoms which were the joys that fell,

And leaves, the hopes that yet remain.

Forget the dead, the past? O yet

There are ghosts that may take revenge for it,

Memories that make the heart a tomb,

Regrets which glide through the spirit’s gloom,

And with ghastly whispers tell

That joy, once lost, is pain.

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SONG OF A SPIRIT.

Within the silent centre of the earth

My mansion is; where I lived insphered

From the beginning, and around my sleep

Have woven all the wondrous imagery

Of this dim spot, which mortals call the world;

Infinite depths of unknown elements

Massed into one impenetrable mask;

Sheets of immeasurable fire, and veins

Of gold and stone, and adamantine iron.

And as a veil in which I walk through Heaven

I have wrought mountains, seas, and waves, and clouds,

And lastly light, whose interfusion dawns

In the dark space of interstellar air.

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LIBERTY.

The fiery mountains answer each other;

Their thunderings are echoed from zone to zone;

The empestuous oceans awake one another,

And the ice-rocks are shaken round winter’s zone

When the clarion of the Typhoon is blown.

From a single cloud the lightning flashes,

Whilst a thousand isles are illumined around,

Earthquake is trampling one city to ashes,

An hundred are shuddering and tottering; the sound

Is bellowing underground.

But keener thy gaze than the lightning’s glare,

And swifter thy step than the earthquake’s tramp;

Thou deafenest the rage of the ocean; thy stare

Makes blind the volcanos; the sun’s bright lamp

To thine is a fen-fire damp.

From billow and mountain and exhalation

The sunlight is darted through vapour and blast;

From spirit to spirit, from nation to nation,

From city to hamlet thy dawning is cast,—

And tyrants and slaves are like shadows of night

In the van of the morning light.

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TO —

Mine eyes were dim with tears unshed;

Yes, I was firm—thus did not thou;—

My baffled looks did fear yet dread

To meet thy looks—I could not know

How anxiously they sought to shine

With soothing pity upon mine.

To sit and curb the soul’s mute rage

Which preys upon itself alone;

To curse the life which is the cage

Of fettered grief that dares not groan,

Hiding from many a careless eye

The scorned load of agony.

Whilst thou alone, then not regarded,

The [] thou alone should be,

To spend years thus, and be rewarded,

As thou, sweet love, requited me

When none were near—Oh! I did wake

From torture for that moment’s sake.

Upon my heart thy accents sweet

Of peace and pity, fell like dew

On flowers half dead;—thy lips did meet

Mine tremblingly; thy dark eyes threw

Thy soft persuasion on my brain,

Charming away its dream of pain.

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We are not happy, sweet; our state

Is strange and full of doubt and fear;

More need of words that ills abate;—

Reserve or censure come not near

Our sacred friendship, lest there be

No solace left for thou and me.

Gentle and good and mild thou art,

Nor I can live if thou appear

Aught but thyself, or turn thine heart

Away from me, or stoop to wear

The mask of scorn, although it be

To hide the love thou feel for me.

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THE ISLE.

There was a little lawny islet

By anemone and violet,

Like mosaic, paven:

And its roof was flowers and leaves

Which the summer’s breath enweaves,

Where nor sun nor showers nor breeze

Pierce the pines and tallest trees,

Each a gem engraven.

Girt by many an azure wave

With which the clouds and mountains pave

A lake’s blue chasm.

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TO —

Music, when soft voices die,

Vibrates in the memory—

Odours, when sweet violets sicken,

Live within the sense they quicken.

Rose leaves, when the rose is dead,

Are heaped for the beloved’s bed;

And so thy thoughts, when thou art gone,

Love itself shall slumber on.

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TIME.

Unfathomable Sea! whose waves are years,

Ocean of Time, whose waters of deep woe

Are brackish with the salt of human tears!

Thou shoreless flood, which in thy ebb and flow

Claspest the limits of mortality!

And sick of prey, yet howling on for more,

Vomitest thy wrecks on its inhospitable shore,

Treacherous in calm, and terrible in storm,

Who shall put forth on thee,

Unfathomable Sea?

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LINES.

That time is dead forever, child,

Drowned, frozen, dead forever!

We look on the past

And stare aghast

At the spectres wailing, pale and ghast,

Of hopes which thou and I beguiled

To death on life’s dark river.

The stream we gazed on then, rolled by;

Its waves are unreturning;

But we yet stand

In a lone land,

Like tombs to mark the memory

Of hopes and fears, which fade and flee

In the light of life’s dim morning.

November 5th, 1817

.

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A SONG.

A widow bird sate mourning for her love

Upon a wintry bough;

The frozen wind kept on above,

The freezing stream below.

There was no leaf upon the forest bare,

No flower upon the ground,

And little motion in the air

Except the mill-wheel’s sound.

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THE WORLD’S WANDERERS.

Tell me, thou star, whose wings of light

Speed thee in thy fiery flight,

In what cavern of the night

Will thy pinions close now?

Tell me, moon, thou pale and grey

Pilgrim of heaven’s homeless way,

In what depth of night or day

Seekest thou repose now?

Weary wind, who wanderest

Like the world’s rejected guest,

Hast thou still some secret nest

On the tree or billow?

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A DIRGE.

Rough wind, that moanest loud

Grief too sad for song;

Wild wind, when sullen cloud

Knells all the night long;

Sad storm, whose tears are vain,

Bare woods, whose branches stain,

Deep caves and dreary main,

Wail, for the world’s wrong!

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LINES.

Far, far away, O ye

Halcyons of memory,

Seek some far calmer nest

Than this abandoned breast;—

No news of your false spring

To my heart’s winter bring,

Once having gone, in vain

Ye come again.

Vultures, who build your bowers

High in the Future’s towers,

Withered hopes on hopes are spread,

Dying joys choked by the dead,

Will serve your beaks for prey

Many a day.

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DIRGE FOR THE YEAR.

Orphan hours, the year is dead,

Come and sigh, come and weep!

Merry hours, smile instead,

For the year is but asleep.

See, it smiles as it is sleeping,

Mocking your untimely weeping.

As an earthquake rocks a corse

In its coffin in the clay,

So White Winter, that rough nurse,

Rocks the death-cold year to-day;

Solemn hours! wait aloud

For your mother in her shroud.

As the wild air stirs and sways

The tree-swung cradle of a child,

So the breath of these rude days

Rocks the year:—be calm and mild,

Trembling hours, she will arise

With new love within her eyes.

January grey is here,

Like a sexton by her grave;

February bears the bier,

March with grief doth howl and rave

And April weeps—but, O, ye hours,

Follow with May’s fairest flowers.

January 1st, 1821

.

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SONNET I.

Ye hasten to the dead! What seek ye there,

Ye restless thoughts and busy purposes

Of the idle brain, which the world’s livery wear?

Oh thou quick Heart which pantest to possess

All that anticipation feigneth fair!

Thou vainly curious mind which wouldest guess

Whence thou didst come, and whither thou may’st go,

And that which never yet was known would know—

Oh, whither hasten ye that thus ye press

With such swift feet life’s green and pleasant path,

Seeking alike from happiness and woe

A refuge in the cavern of grey death?

Oh heart, and mind, and thoughts! What thing do you

Hope to inherit in the grave below?

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SONNET II.
POLITICAL GREATNESS.

Nor happiness, nor majesty, nor fame,

Nor peace, nor strength, nor skill in arms or arts,

Shepherd those herds whom tyranny makes tame;

Verse echoes not one beating of their hearts,

History is but the shadow of their shame,

Art veils her glass, or from the pageant starts

As to oblivion their blind millions fleet,

Staining that Heaven with obscene imagery

Of their own likeness. What are numbers knit

By force or custom? Man who man would be,

Must rule the empire of himself; in it

Must be supreme, establishing his throne

On vanquished will, quelling the anarchy

Of hopes and fears, being himself alone.

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SONNET III.

Alas! good friend, what profit can you see

In hating such an hateless thing as me?

There is no sport in hate where all the rage

Is on one side. In vain would you assuage

Your frowns upon an unresisting smile,

In which not even contempt lurks, to beguile

Your heart, by some faint sympathy of hate.

O conquer what you cannot satiate!

For to your passion I am far more coy

Than ever yet was coldest maid or boy

In winter noon. Of your antipathy

If I am the Narcissus, you are free

To pine into a sound with hating me.

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SONNET IV.

Lift not the painted veil which those who live

Call Life: though unreal shapes be pictured there,

And it but mimic all we would believe

With colours idly spread:—behind, lurk Fear

And Hope, twin destinies; who ever weave

The shadows, which the world calls substance, there.

I knew one who lifted it—he sought,

For his lost heart was tender, things to love

But found them not, alas! nor was there aught

The world contains, the which he could approve.

Through the unheeding many he did move,

A splendour among shadows, a bright blot

Upon this gloomy scene, a Spirit that strove

For truth, and like the Preacher found it not.

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FRAGMENTS.

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GINEVRA.*

Wild, pale, and wonder-stricken, even as one

Who staggers forth into the air and sun

From the dark chamber of a mortal fever,

Bewildered, and incapable, and ever

Fancying strange comments in her dizzy brain

Of usual shapes, till the familiar train

Of objects and of persons passed like things

Strange as a dreamer’s mad imaginings,

Ginevra from the nuptial altar went;

The vows to which her lips had sworn assent

Rung in her brain still with a jarring din,

Deafening the lost intelligence within.

And so she moved under the bridal veil,

Which made the paleness of her cheek more pale,

And deepened the faint crimson of her mouth,

And darkened her dark locks, as moonlight doth,—

And of the gold and jewels glittering there

She scarce felt conscious,—but the weary glare

Lay like a chaos of unwelcome light,

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Vexing the sense with gorgeous undelight.

A moonbeam in the shadow of a cloud

Was less heavenly fair—her face was bowed,

And as she passed, the diamonds in her hair

Were mirrored in the polished marble stair

Which led from the cathedral to the street;

And ever as she went her light fair feet

Erased these images.

The bride-maidens who round her thronging came,

Some with a sense of self-rebuke and shame,

Envying the unenviable; and others

Making the joy which should have been another’s

Their own by gentle sympathy; and some

Sighing to think of an unhappy home:

Some few admiring what can ever lure

Maidens to leave the heaven serene and pure

Of parents’ smiles for life’s great cheat; a thing

Better to taste sweet in imagining.

But they are all dispersed—and, lo! she stands

Looking in idle grief on her white hands,

Alone within the garden now her own;

And through the sunny air, with jangling tone,

The music of the merry marriage bells,

Killing the azure silence, sinks and swells;—

Absorbed like one within a dream who dreams

That he is dreaming, until slumber seems

A mockery of itself—when suddenly

Antonio stood before her, pale as she.

With agony, with sorrow, and with pride,

He lifted his wan eyes upon the bride,

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And said—“Is this thy faith?” and then as one

Whose sleeping face is stricken by the sun

With light like a harsh voice, which bids him rise

And look upon his day of life with eyes

Which weep in vain that they can dream no more,

Ginevra saw her lover, and forbore

To shriek or faint, and checked the stifling blood

Rushing upon her heart, and unsubdued

Said—“Friend, if earthly violence or ill,

Suspicion, doubt, or the tyrannic will

Of parents, chance, or custom, time or change,

Or circumstance, or terror, or revenge,

Or wildered looks, or words, or evil speech,

With all their stings [] can impeach

Our love,—we love not:—if the grave which hides

The victim from the tyrant, and divides

The cheek that whitens from the eyes that dart

Imperious inquisition to the heart

That is another’s, could dissever ours,

We love not.”—“What do not the silent hours

Beckon thee to Gherardi’s bridal bed?

Is not that ring”—a pledge, he would have said,

Of broken vows, but she with patient look

The golden circle from her finger took,

And said—“Accept this token of my faith,

The pledge of vows to be absolved by death;

And I am dead or shall be soon—my knell

Will mix it’s music with that merry bell,

Does it not sound as if they sweetly said

‘We toll a corpse out of the marriage bed?’

The flowers upon my bridal chamber strewn

Will serve unfaded for my bier—so soon

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That even the dying violet will not die

Before Ginevra.” The strong fantasy

Had made her accents weaker and more weak,

And quenched the crimson life upon her cheek,

And glazed her eyes, and spread an atmosphere

Round her, which chilled the burning noon with fear,

Making her but an image of the thought,

Which, like a prophet or a shadow, brought

News of the terrors of the coming time.

Like an accuser branded with the crime

He would have cast on a beloved friend,

Whose dying eyes reproach not to the end

The pale betrayer—he then with vain repentance

Would share, he cannot now avert, the sentence—

Antonio stood and would have spoken, when

The compound voice of women and of men

Was heard approaching; he retired, while she

Was led amid the admiring company

Back to the palace,—and her maidens soon

Changed her attire for the afternoon,

And left her at her own request to keep

An hour of quiet and rest:—like one asleep

With open eyes and folded hands she lay,

Pale in the light of the declining day.

Meanwhile the day sinks fast, the sun is set,

And in the lighted hall the guests are met;

The beautiful looked lovelier in the light

Of love, and admiration, and delight

Reflected from a thousand hearts and eyes

Kindling a momentary Paradise.

This crowd is safer than the silent wood,

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Where love’s own doubts disturb the solitude;

On frozen hearts the fiery rain of wine

Falls, and the dew of music more divine

Tempers the deep emotions of the time

To spirits cradled in a sunny clime:—

How many meet, who never yet have met,

To part too soon, but never to forget.

How many saw the beauty, power and wit

Of looks and words which ne’er enchanted yet;

But life’s familiar veil was now withdrawn,

As the world leaps before an earthquake’s dawn,

And unprophetic of the coming hours,

The matin winds from the expanded flowers,

Scatter their hoarded incense, and awaken

The earth, until the dewy sleep is shaken

From every living heart which it possesses,

Through seas and winds, cities and wildernesses,

As if the future and the past were all

Treasured i’the instant;—so Gherardi’s hall

Laughed in the mirth of its lord’s festival,

Till some one asked—“Where is the Bride?” And then

A bride’s-maid went,—and ere she came again

A silence fell upon the guests—a pause

Of expectation, as when beauty awes

All hearts with its approach, though unbeheld;

Then wonder, and then fear that wonder quelled;—

For whispers passed from mouth to ear which drew

The colour from the hearer’s cheeks, and flew

Louder and swifter round the company;

And then Gherardi entered with an eye

Of ostentatious trouble, and a crowd

Surrounded him, and some were weeping loud.

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They found Ginevra dead! if it be death,

To lie without motion, or pulse, or breath,

With waxen cheeks, and limbs cold, stiff, and white,

And open eyes, whose fixed and glassy light

Mocked at the speculation they had owned.

If it be death, when there is felt around

A smell of clay, a pale and icy glare,

And silence, and a sense that lifts the hair

From the scalp to the ancles, as it were

Corruption from the spirit passing forth,

And giving all it shrouded to the earth,

And leaving as swift lightning in its flight

Ashes, and smoke, and darkness: in our night

Of thought we know thus much of death,—no more

Than the unborn dream of our life before

Their barks are wrecked on its inhospitable shore.

The marriage feast and its solemnity

Was turned to funeral pomp—the company

With heavy hearts and looks, broke up; nor they

Who loved the dead went weeping on their way

Alone, but sorrow mixed with sad surprize

Loosened the springs of pity in all eyes,

On which that form, whose fate they weep in vain,

Will never, thought they, kindle smiles again.

The lamps which half extinguished in their haste

Gleamed few and faint o’er the abandoned feast,

Shewed as it were within the vaulted room

A cloud of sorrow hanging, as if gloom

Had passed out of men’s minds into the air.

Some few yet stood around Gherardi there,

Friends and relations of the dead,—and he,

A loveless man, accepted torpidly

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The consolation that he wanted not,

Awe in the place of grief within him wrought.

Their whispers made the solemn silence seem

More still—some wept, []

Some melted into tears without a sob,

And some with hearts that might be heard to throb

Leant on the table, and at intervals

Shuddered to hear through the deserted halls

And corridors the thrilling shrieks which came

Upon the breeze of night, that shook the flame

Of every torch and taper as it swept

From out the chamber where the women kept;—

Their tears fell on the dear companion cold

Of pleasures now departed; then was knolled

The bell of death, and soon the priests arrived,

And finding death their penitent had shrived,

Returned like ravens from a corpse whereon

A vulture has just feasted to the bone.

And then the mourning women came.—

* * * * * *

THE DIRGE.

Old winter was gone

In his weakness back to the mountains hoar,

And the spring came down

From the planet that hovers upon the shore

Where the sea of sunlight encroaches

On the limits of wintry night;—

If the land, and the air, and the sea

Rejoice not when spring approaches,

We did not rejoice in thee,

Ginevra!

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She is still, she is cold

On the bridal couch,

One step to the white death bed,

And one to the bier,

And one to the charnel—and one, O where?

The dark arrow fled

In the noon.

Ere the sun through heaven once more has rolled,

The rats in her heart

Will have made their nest,

And the worms be alive in her golden hair,

While the spirit that guides the sun,

Sits throned in his flaming chair,

She shall sleep.

* * * * * *

Pisa

,

1821

.

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CHARLES THE FIRST.
FRAGMENTS.

ACT I. SCENE I.

The Pageant to [celebrate] the arrival of the Queen.

a pursuivant.

Place, for the Marshal of the Masque!

first speaker.

What thinkest thou of this quaint masque, which turns,

Like morning from the shadow of the night,

The night to day, and London to a place

Of peace and joy?

second speaker.

And Hell to Heaven.

Eight years are gone,

And they seem hours, since in this populous street

I trod on grass made green by summer’s rain,

For the red plague kept state within that palace

Where now reigns vanity—in nine years more

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The roots will be refreshed with civil blood;

And thank the mercy of insulted Heaven

That sin and wrongs wound as an orphan’s cry,

The patience of the great avenger’s ear.

third speaker. (a youth).

Yet, father, tis a happy sight to see,

Beautiful, innocent, and unforbidden

By God or man;—’tis like the bright procession

Of skiey visions in a solemn dream

From which men wake as from a paradise,

And draw new strength to tread the thorns of life.

If God be good, wherefore should this be evil?

And if this be not evil, dost thou not draw

Unseasonable poison from the flowers

Which bloom so rarely in this barren world?

O, kill these bitter thoughts which make the present

Dark as the future!—

* * * * * * *

When avarice and tyranny, vigilant fear,

And open-eyed conspiracy lie sleeping

As on Hell’s threshold; and all gentle thoughts

Waken to worship him who giveth joys

With his own gift.

second speaker.

How young art thou in this old age of time!

How green in this grey world! Canst thou not think

Of change in that low scene, in which thou art

Not a spectator but an actor? []

The day that dawns in fire will die in storms,

Even though the noon be calm. My travel’s done;

Before the whirlwind wakes I shall have found

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My inn of lasting rest, but thou must still

Be journeying on in this inclement air.

* * * * * * *

first speaker.

That

Is the Archbishop.

second speaker.

Rather say the Pope.

London will be soon his Rome: he walks

As if he trod upon the heads of men.

He looks elate, drunken with blood and gold;—

Beside him moves the Babylonian woman

Invisibly, and with her as with his shadow,

Mitred adulterer! he is joined in sin,

Which turns Heaven’s milk of mercy to revenge.

another citizen (lifting up his eyes).

Good Lord! rain it down upon him. []

Amid her ladies walks the papist queen,

As if her nice feet scorned our English earth.

There’s old Sir Henry Vane, the Earl of Pembroke,

Lord Essex, and Lord Keeper Coventry,

And others who make base their English breed

By vile participation of their honours

With papists, atheists, tyrants, and apostates.

When lawyers mask ’tis time for honest men

To strip the vizor from their purposes.

* * * * * * *

fourth speaker (a pursuirant)

Give place, give place!—

You torch-bearers advance to the great gate,

And then attend the Marshal of the Masque

Into the Royal presence.

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fifth speaker (a law student).

What thinkest thou

Of this quaint show of ours, my aged friend?

first speaker.

I will not think but that our country’s wounds

May yet be healed—The king is just and gracious,

Though wicked counsels now pervert his will:

These once cast off—

second speaker.

As adders cast their skins

And keep their venom, so kings often change;

Councils and counsellors hang on one another,

Hiding the loathsome []

Like the base patchwork of a leper’s rags.

third speaker.

O, still those dissonant thoughts—List! loud music

Grows on the enchanted air! And see, the torches

Restlessly flashing, and the crowd divided

Like waves before an Admiral’s prow.

* * * * * *

another speaker.

Give place—

To the Marshal of the Masque!

third speaker.

How glorious! See those thronging chariots

Rolling like painted clouds before the wind:

Some are

Like curved shells dyed by the azure depths

Of Indian seas; some like the new-born moon;

And some like cars in which the Romans climbed

(Canopied by Victory’s eagle wings outspread)

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The Capitolian—See how gloriously

The mettled horses in the torchlight stir

Their gallant riders, while they check their pride,

Like shapes of some diviner element!

second speaker.

Aye, there they are—

Nobles, and sons of nobles, patentees,

Monopolists, and stewards of this poor farm,

On whose lean sheep sit the prophetic crows.

Here is the pomp that strips the houseless orphan,

Here is the pride that breaks the desolate heart.

These are the lilies glorious as Solomon,

Who toil not, neither do they spin,—unless

It be the webs they catch poor rogues withal.

Here is the surfeit which to them who earn

The niggard wages of the earth, scarce leaves

The tithe that will support them till they crawl

Back to its cold hard bosom. Here is health

Followed by grim disease, glory by shame,

Waste by lame famine, wealth by squalid want,

And England’s sin by England’s punishment.

And, as the effect pursues the cause foregone,

Lo, giving substance to my words, behold

At once the sign and the thing signified—

A troop of cripples, beggars, and lean outcasts,

Horsed upon stumbling shapes, carted with dung,

Dragged for a day from cellars and low cabins

And rotten hiding-holes to point the moral

Of this presentiment, and bring up the rear

Of painted pomp with misery!

speaker.

’Tis but

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The anti-masque, and serves as discords do

In sweetest music. Who would love May flowers

If they succeeded not to Winter’s flaw;

Or day unchanged by night; or joy itself

Without the touch of sorrow?

* * * * * *

SCENE II.

A Chamber in Whitehall.

Enter the King, Queen, Laud, Wentworth, and Archy.

king.

Thanks, gentlemen, I heartily accept

This token of your service: your gay masque

Was performed gallantly.

queen.

And, gentlemen,

Call your poor Queen your debtor. Your quaint pageant

Rose on me like the figures of past years,

Treading their still path back to infancy,

More beautiful and mild as they draw nearer

The quiet cradle. I could have almost wept

To think I was in Paris, where these shows

Are well devised—such as I was ere yet

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My young heart shared with [] the task,

The careful weight of this great monarchy.

There, gentlemen, between the sovereign’s pleasure

And that which it regards, no clamour lifts

Its proud interposition.

* * * * * *

king.

My lord of Canterbury.

archy.

The fool is here.

laud.

I crave permission of your Majesty

To order that this insolent fellow be

Chastised, he mocks the sacred character,

Scoffs at the stake, and—

king.

What, my Archy!

He mocks and mimics all he sees and hears,

Yet with a quaint and graceful license—Prithee

For this once do not as Prynne would, were he

Primate of England.

He lives in his own world; and, like a parrot,

Hung in his gilded prison from the window

Of a queen’s bower over the public way,

Blasphemes with a bird’s mind:—his words, like arrows

Which know no aim beyond the archer’s wit,

Strike sometimes what eludes philosophy.

queen.

Go, sirrah, and repent of your offence

Ten minutes in the rain: be it your penance

To bring news how the world goes there. Poor Archy!

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He weaves about himself a world of mirth

Out of this wreck of ours.

laud.

I take with patience, as my master did,

All scoffs permitted from above.

king.

My Lord,

Pray overlook these papers. Archy’s words

Had wings, but these have talons.

queen.

And the lion

That wears them must be tamed. My dearest lord,

I see the new-born courage in your eye

Armed to strike dead the spirit of the time.

* * * * *

Do thou persist: for, faint but in resolve,

And it were better thou hadst still remained

The slave of thine own slaves, who tear like curs

The fugitive, and flee from the pursuer;

And Opportunity, that empty wolf,

Flies at his throat who falls. Subdue thy actions

Even to the disposition of thy purpose,

And be that tempered as the Ebro’s steel;

And banish weak-eyed Mercy to the weak

Whence she will greet thee with a gift of peace,

And not betray thee with a traitor’s kiss,

As when she keeps the company of rebels,

Who think that she is fear. This do, lest we

Should fall as from a glorious pinnacle

In a bright dream, and wake as from a dream

Out of our worshipped state.

* * * * *

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laud.

* * And if this suffice not,

Unleash the sword and fire, that in their thirst

They may lick up that scum of schismatics.

I laugh at those weak rebels who, desiring

What we possess, still prate of christian peace,

As if those dreadful messengers of wrath,

Which play the part of God ’twixt right and wrong,

Should be let loose against innocent sleep

Of templed cities and the smiling fields,

For some poor argument of policy

Which touches our own profit or our pride,

Where it indeed were christian charity

To turn the cheek even to the smiter’s hand:

And when our great Redeemer, when our God

Is scorned in his immediate ministers,

They talk of peace!

Such peace as Canaan found, let Scotland now.

* * * * *

queen.

My beloved lord,

Have you not noted that the fool of late

Has lost his careless mirth, and that his words

Sound like the echoes of our saddest fears?

What can it mean? I should be loth to think

Some factious slave had tutored him.

king.

It partly is,

That our minds piece the vacant intervals

Of his wild words with their own fashioning;

As in the imagery of summer clouds,

Or coals in the winter fire, idlers find

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The perfect shadows of their teeming thoughts:

And partly, that the terrors of the time

Are sown by wandering Rumour in all spirits;

And in the lightest and the least, may best

Be seen the current of the coming wind.

queen.

Your brain is overwrought with these deep thoughts;

Come, I will sing to you; let us go try

These airs from Italy,—and you shall see

A cradled miniature of yourself asleep,

Stamped on the heart by never-erring love;

Liker than any Vandyke ever made,

A pattern to the unborn age of thee,

Over whose sweet beauty I have wept for joy

A thousand times, and now should weep for sorrow,

Did I not think that after we were dead

Our fortunes would spring high in him, and that

The cares we waste upon our heavy crown

Would make it light and glorious as a wreath

Of heaven’s beams for his dear innocent brow.

king.

Dear Henrietta!

* * * * *

SCENE III.

Hamiden, Pym, Cromwell, and the younger Vane.

hampden.

England, farewell! thou, who hast been my cradle,

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Shalt never be my dungeon or my grave!

I held what I inherited in thee,

As pawn for that inheritance of freedom

Which thou hast sold for thy despoiler’s smile:—

How can I call thee England, or my country?

Does the wind hold?

vane.

The vanes sit steady

Upon the Abbey towers. The silver lightnings

Of the evening star, spite of the city’s smoke,

Tell that the north wind reigns in the upper air.

Mark too that flock of fleecy winged clouds

Sailing athwart St. Margaret’s.

hampden.

Hail, fleet herald

Of tempest! that wild pilot who shall guide

Hearts free as his, to realms as pure as thee,

Beyond the shot of tyranny! And thou,

Fair star, whose beam lies on the wide Atlantic,

Athwart its zones of tempest and of calm,

Bright as the path to a beloved home,

O light us to the isles of th’ evening land!

Like floating Edens, cradled in the glimmer

Of sunset, through the distant mist of years

Tinged by departing Hope, they gleam! Lone regions,

Where power’s poor dupes and victims, yet have never

Propitiated the savage fear of kings

With purest blood of noblest hearts; whose dew

Is yet unstained with tears of those who wake

To weep each day the wrongs on which it dawns;

Whose sacred silent air owns yet no echo

Of formal blasphemies; nor impious rites

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Wrest man’s free worship from the God who loves

Towards the worm, who envies us his love,

Receive thou young [] of Paradise,

These exiles from the old and sinful world!

This glorious clime, this firmament, whose lights

Dart mitigated influence through the veil

Of pale blue atmosphere; whose tears keep green

The pavement of this moist all-feeding earth,

This vaporous horizon; whose dim round

Is bastioned by the circumfluous sea,

Repelling invasion from the sacred towers,

Presses upon me like a dungeon’s grate,

A low dark roof, a damp and narrow vault:

The mighty universe becomes a cell

Too narrow for the soul that owns no master.

While the loathliest spot

Of this wide prison, England, is a nest

Of cradled peace built on the mountain tops,

To which the eagle-spirits of the free,

Which range through heaven and earth, and scorn the storm

Of time, and gaze upon the light of truth,

Return to brood over the [] thoughts

That cannot die, and may not be repelled.

* * * * *

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PRINCE ATHANASE.
PART II.

FRAGMENT I.

Prince Athanase had one beloved friend,

An old, old man, with hair of silver white,

And lips where heavenly smiles would hang and blend

With his wise words; and eyes whose arrowy light

Shone like the reflex of a thousand minds.

He was the last whom superstition’s blight

Had spared in Greece—the blight that cramps and blinds,—

And in his olive bower at Œnoe

Had sate from earliest youth. Like one who finds

A fertile island in the barren sea,

One mariner who has survived his mates

Many a drear month in a great ship—so he

With soul-sustaining songs, and sweet debates

Of ancient lore, there fed his lonely being:—

“The mind becomes that which it contemplates,”—

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And thus Zonoras, by forever seeing

Their bright creations, grew like wisest men;

And when he heard the crash of nations fleeing

A bloodier power than ruled thy ruins then,

O sacred Hellas! many weary years

He wandered, till the path of Laian’s glen

Was grass-grown—and the unremembered tears

Were dry in Laian for their honoured chief,

Who fell in Byzant, pierced by Moslem spears:—

And as the lady looked with faithful grief

From her high lattice o’er the rugged path,

Where she once saw that horseman toil, with brief

And blighting hope, who with the news of death

Struck body and soul as with a mortal blight,

She saw beneath the chesnuts, far beneath,

An old man toiling up, a weary wight;

And soon within her hospitable hall

She saw his white hairs glittering in the light

Of the wood fire, and round his shoulders fall;

And his wan visage and his withered mien

Yet calm and [] and majestical.

And Athanase, her child, who must have been

Then three years old, sate opposite and gazed.

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FRAGMENT II.

Such was Zonoras; and as daylight finds

An amaranth glittering on the path of frost,

When autumn nights have nipt all weaker kinds,

Thus had his age, dark, cold, and tempest-tost,

Shone truth upon Zonoras; and he filled

From fountains pure, nigh overgrown and lost,

The spirit of Prince Athanase, a child,

With soul-sustaining songs of ancient lore

And philosophic wisdom, clear and mild.

And sweet and subtle talk they evermore,

The pupil and master shared; until,

Sharing the undiminishable store,

The youth, as shadows on a grassy hill

Outrun the winds that chase them, soon outran

His teacher, and did teach with native skill

Strange truths and new to that experienced man;

Still they were friends, as few have ever been

Who mark the extremes of life’s discordant span.

And in the caverns of the forest green,

Or by the rocks of echoing ocean hoar,

Zonoras and Prince Athanase were seen

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By summer woodmen; and when winter’s roar

Sounded o’er earth and sea its blast of war,

The Balearic fisher, driven from shore,

Hanging upon the peaked wave afar,

Then saw their lamp from Laian’s turret gleam,

Piercing the stormy darkness like a star,

Which pours beyond the sea one stedfast beam,

Whilst all the constellations of the sky

Seemed wrecked. They did but seem—

For, lo! the wintry clouds are all gone by,

And bright Arcturus through you pines is glowing,

And far o’er southern waves, immoveably

Belted Orion hangs—warm light is flowing

From the young moon into the sunset’s chasm.—

“O, summer night! with power divine, bestowing

“On thine own bird the sweet enthusiasm

Which overflows in notes of liquid gladness,

Filling the sky like light! How many a spasm

“Of fevered brains, oppressed with grief and madness,

Were lulled by thee, delightful nightingale!

And these soft waves, murmuring a gentle sadness,

“And the far sighings of you piny dale

Made vocal by some wind, we feel not here,—

I bear alone what nothing may avail

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“To lighten—a strange load!”—No human ear

Heard this lament; but o’er the visage wan

Of Athanase, a ruffling atmosphere

Of dark emotion, a swift shadow ran,

Like wind upon some forest-bosomed lake,

Glassy and dark.—And that divine old man

Beheld his mystic friend’s whole being shake,

Even where its inmost depths were gloomiest—

And with a calm and measured voice he spake,

And with a soft and equal pressure, prest

That cold lean hand:—“Dost thou remember yet

When the curved moon then lingering in the west

“Paused in you waves her mighty horns to wet,

How in those beams we walked, half resting on the sea?

’Tis just one year—sure thou dost not forget—

“Then Plato’s words of light in thee and me

Lingered like moonlight in the moonless east,

For we had just then read—thy memory

“Is faithful now—the story of the feast;

And Agathon and Diotima seemed

From death and [] released.

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FRAGMENT III.

’Twas at the season when the Earth upsprings

From slumber, as a sphered angel’s child,

Shadowing its eyes with green and golden wings,

Stands up before its mother bright and mild,

Of whose soft voice the air expectant seems—

So stood before the sun, which shone and smiled

To see it rise thus joyous from its dreams,

The fresh and radiant Earth. The hoary grove

Waxed green—and flowers burst forth like starry beams;—

The grass in the warm sun did start and move,

And sea-buds burst under the waves serene:—

How many a one, though none be near to love,

Loves then the shade of his own soul, half seen

In any mirror—or the spring’s young minions,

The winged leaves amid the copses green;—

How many a spirit then puts on the pinions

Of fancy, and outstrips the lagging blast,

And his own steps—and over wide dominions

Sweeps in his dream-drawn chariot, far and fast,

More fleet than storms—the wide world shrinks below,

When winter and despondency are past.

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’Twas at this season that Prince Athanase

Past the white Alps—those eagle-baffling mountains

Slept in their shrouds of snow;—beside the ways

The waterfalls were voiceless—for their fountains

Were changed to mines of sunless crystal now,

Or by the curdling winds—like brazen wings

Which clanged alone the mountain’s marble brow,

Warped into adamantine fretwork, hung

And filled with frozen light the chasm below.

FRAGMENT IV.

Thou art the wine whose drunkenness is all

We can desire, O Love! and happy souls,

Ere from thy vine the leaves of autumn fall,

Catch thee, and feed from their o’erflowing bowls

Thousands who thirst for thy ambrosial dew;—

Thou art the radiance which where ocean rolls

Invests it; and when heavens are blue

Thou fillest them; and when the earth is fair

The shadow of thy moving wings imbue

Its desarts and its mountains, till they wear

Beauty like some bright robe;—thou ever soarest

Among the towers of men, and as soft air

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In spring, which moves the unawakened forest,

Clothing with leaves its branches bare and bleak,

Thou floatest among men; and aye implorest

That which from thee they should implore:—the weak

Alone kneel to thee, offering up the hearts

The strong have broken—yet where shall any seek

A garment whom thou clothest not?

Marlow

,

1817

.

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MAZENGHI.*

Oh! foster-nurse of man’s abandoned glory,

Since Athens, its great mother, sunk in splendour;

Thou shadowest forth that mighty shape in story,

As ocean its wrecked fanes, severe yet tender:—

The light-invested angel Poesy

Was drawn from the dim world to welcome thee.

And thou in painting didst transcribe all taught

By loftiest meditations; marble knew

The sculptor’s fearless soul—and as he wrought,

The grace of his own power and freedom grew.

And more than all, heroic, just, sublime

Thou wert among the false—was this thy crime?

Yes; and on Pisa’s marble walls the twine

Of direst weeds hangs garlanded—the snake

Inhabits its wrecked palaces;—in thine

A beast of subtler venom now doth make

Its lair, and sits amid their glories overthrown,

And thus thy victim’s fate is as thine own.

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The sweetest flowers are ever frail and rare,

And love and freedom blossom but to wither;

And good and ill like vines entangled are,

So that their grapes may oft be plucked together;—

Divide the vintage ere thou drink, then make

Thy heart rejoice for dead Mazenghi’s sake.

No record of his crime remains in story,

But if the morning bright as evening shone,

It was some high and holy deed, by glory

Pursued into forgetfulness, which won

From the blind crowd he made secure and free

The patriot’s meed, toil, death, and infamy.

For when by sound of trumpet was declared

A price upon his life, and there was set

A penalty of blood on all who shared

So much of water with him as might wet

His lips, which speech divided not—he went

Alone, as you may guess, to banishment.

Amid the mountains, like a hunted beast,

He hid himself, and hunger, cold, and toil,

Month after month endured; it was a feast

Whene’er he found those globes of deep red gold

Which in the woods the strawberry-tree doth bear,

Suspended in their emerald atmosphere.

And in the roofless huts of vast morasses,

Deserted by the fever-stricken serf,

All overgrown with reeds and long rank grasses,

And hillocks heaped of moss-inwoven turf,

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And where the huge and speckled aloe made,

Rooted in stones, a broad and pointed shade,

He housed himself. There is a point of strand

Near Vada’s tower and town; and on one side

The treacherous marsh divides it from the land,

Shadowed by pine and ilex forests wide,

And on the other creeps eternally,

Through muddy weeds, the shallow, sullen sea.

Naples

,

1818

.

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THE WOODMAN AND THE NIGHTINGALE.

A woodman whose rough heart was out of tune

(I think such hearts yet never came to good)

Hated to hear, under the stars or moon

One nightingale in an interfluous wood

Satiate the hungry dark with melody;—

And as a vale is watered by a flood,

Or as the moonlight fills the open sky

Struggling with darkness—as a tuberose

Peoples some Indian dell with scents which lie

Like clouds above the flower from which they rose,

The singing of that happy nightingale

In this sweet forest, from the golden close

Of evening, till the star of dawn may fail,

Was interfused upon the silentness;

The folded roses and the violets pale

Heard her within their slumbers, the abyss

Of heaven with all its planets; the dull ear

Of the night-cradled earth; the loneliness

Of the circumfluous waters,—every sphere

And every flower and beam and cloud and wave,

And every wind of the mute atmosphere,

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And every beast stretched in its rugged cave,

And every bird lulled on its mossy bough,

And every silver moth fresh from the grave,

Which is its cradle—ever from below

Aspiring like one who loves too fair, too far,

To be consumed within the purest glow

Of one serene and unapproached star,

As if it were a lamp of earthly light,

Unconscious, as some human lovers are,

Itself how low, how high beyond all height

The heaven where it would perish!—and every form

That worshipped in the temple of the night

Was awed into delight, and by the charm

Girt as with an interminable zone,

Whilst that sweet bird, whose music was a storm

Of sound, shook forth the dull oblivion

Out of their dreams; harmony became love

In every soul but one . . . .

And so this man returned with axe and saw

At evening close from killing the tall treen,

The soul of whom by nature’s gentle law

Was each a wood-nymph, and kept ever green

The pavement and the roof of the wild copse,

Chequering the sunlight of the blue serene

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With jagged leaves,—and from the forest tops

Singing the winds to sleep—or weeping oft

Fast showers of aerial water drops

Into their mother’s bosom, sweet and soft,

Nature’s pure tears which have no bitterness;—

Around the cradles of the birds aloft

They spread themselves into the loveliness

Of fan-like leaves, and over palid flowers

Hang like moist clouds:—or, where high branches kiss,

Make a green space among the silent bowers,

Like a vast fane in a metropolis,

Surrounded by the columns and the towers

All overwrought with branch-like traceries

In which there is religion—and the mute

Persuasion of unkindled melodies,

Odours and gleams and murmurs, which the lute

Of the blind pilot-spirit of the blast

Stirs as it sails, now grave and now acute,

Wakening the leaves and waves ere it has past

To such brief unison as on the brain

One tone, which never can recur, has cast,

One accent never to return again.

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TO THE MOON.

Art thou pale for weariness

Of climbing heaven, and gazing on the earth,

Wandering companionless

Among the stars that have a different birth,—

And ever changing, like a joyless eye

That finds no object worth its constancy?

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SONG FOR TASSO.

I loved—alas! our life is love;

But when we cease to breathe and move

I do suppose love ceases too.

I thought, but not as now I do,

Keen thoughts and bright of linked lore,

Of all that men had thought before,

And all that nature shows, and more.

And still I love and still I think,

But strangely, for my heart can drink

The dregs of such despair, and live,

And love; []

And if I think, my thoughts come fast,

I mix the present with the past,

And each seems uglier than the last.

Sometimes I see before me flee

A silver spirit’s form, like thee,

O Leonora, and I sit

[] still watching it,

Till by the grated casement’s ledge

It fades, with such a sigh, as sedge

Breathes o’er the breezy streamlet’s edge.

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THE WANING MOON.

And like a dying lady, lean and pale,

Who totters forth, wrapt in a gauzy veil,

Out of her chamber, led by the insane

And feeble wanderings of her fading brain,

The moon arose up in the murky earth,

A white and shapeless mass.

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EPITAPH.

These are two friends whose lives were undivided,

So let their memory be, now they have glided

Under the grave; let not their bones be parted,

For their two hearts in life were single hearted.

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ALASTOR; OR THE SPIRIT OF SOLITUDE.

Nondum amabam, et amare amabam, quærebam quid amarem amans amare.

—Confess. St. August.

Edition: current; Page: [268] Edition: current; Page: [269]

Earth, ocean, air, beloved brotherhood!

If our great Mother has imbued my soul

With aught of natural piety to feel

Your love, and recompense the boon with mine;

If dewy morn, and odorous noon, and even,

With sunset and its gorgeous ministers,

And solemn midnight’s tingling silentness;

If autumn’s hollow sighs in the sere wood,

And winter robing with pure snow and crowns

Of starry ice the gray grass and bare boughs;Shelley1824: 10

If spring’s voluptuous pantings when she breathes

Her first sweet kisses, have been dear to me;

If no bright bird, insect, or gentle beast

I consciously have injured, but still loved

And cherished these my kindred;—then forgive

This boast, beloved brethren, and withdraw

No portion of your wonted favour now!

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Mother of this unfathomable world!

Favour my solemn song, for I have loved

Thee ever, and thee only; I have watchedShelley1824: 20

Thy shadow, and the darkness of thy steps

And my heart ever gazes on the depth

Of thy deep mysteries. I have made my bed

In charnels and on coffins, where black death

Keeps record of the trophies won from thee,

Hoping to still these obstinate questionings

Of thee and thine, by forcing some lone ghost,

Thy messenger, to render up the tale

Of what we are. In lone and silent hours,

When night makes a weird sound of its own stillness,Shelley1824: 30

Like an inspired and desperate alchymist

Staking his very life on some dark hope,

Have I mixed awful talk and asking looks

With my most innocent love, until strange tears

Uniting with those breathless kisses, made

Such magic as compels the charmed night

To render up thy charge: . . . . and, though ne’er yet

Thou hast unveiled thy inmost sanctuary,

Enough from incommunicable dream,

And twilight phantasms and deep noonday thoughtShelley1824: 40

Has shone within me, that serenely now,

And moveless as a long-forgotten lyre,

Suspended in the solitary dome

Of some mysterious and deserted fane,

I wait thy breath, Great Parent, that my strain

May modulate with murmurs of the air,

And motions of the forests and the sea,

And voice of living beings, and woven hymns

Of night and day, and the deep heart of man.

Edition: current; Page: [271]

There was a Poet whose untimely tombShelley1824: 50

No human hands with pious reverence reared,

But the charmed eddies of autumnal winds

Built o’er his mouldering bones a pyramid

Of mouldering leaves in the waste wilderness:

A lovely youth,—no mourning maiden decked

With weeping flowers, or votive cypress wreath,

The lone couch of his everlasting sleep:

Gentle, and brave, and generous, no lorn bard

Breathed o’er his dark fate one melodious sigh:

He lived, he died, he sung, in solitude.Shelley1824: 60

Strangers have wept to hear his passionate notes,

And virgins, as unknown he past, have sighed

And wasted for fond love of his wild eyes.

The fire of those soft orbs has ceased to burn,

And Silence, too enamoured of that voice,

Locks its mute music in her rugged cell.

By solemn vision and bright silver dream,

His infancy was nurtured. Every sight

And sound from the vast earth and ambient air,

Sent to his heart its choicest impulses.Shelley1824: 70

The fountains of divine philosophy

Fled not his thirsting lips; and all of great,

Or good, or lovely, which the sacred past

In truth or fable consecrates, he felt

And knew. When early youth had past, he left

His cold fireside and alienated home

To seek strange truths in undiscovered lands.

Many a wide waste and tangled wilderness

Has lured his fearless steps; and as he bought

With his sweet voice and eyes, from savage men,Shelley1824: 80

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His rest and food. Nature’s most secret steps

He like her shadow, has pursued, where’er

The red volcano overcanopies

Its fields of snow and pinnacles of ice

With burning smoke; or where bitumen lakes,

On black bare pointed islets ever beat

With sluggish surge; or where the secret caves

Rugged and dark, winding among the springs

Of fire and poison, inaccessible

To avarice or pride, their starry domesShelley1824: 90

Of diamond and of gold expand above

Numberless and immeasurable halls,

Frequent with crystal column, and clear shrines

Of pearl, and thrones radiant with chrysolite.

Nor had that scene of ampler majesty

Than gems or gold, the varying roof of heaven

And the green earth lost in his heart its claims

To love and wonder; he would linger long

In lonesome vales, making the wild his home,

Until the doves and squirrels would partakeShelley1824: 100

From his innocuous hand his bloodless food,

Lured by the gentle meaning of his looks,

And the wild antelope, that starts whene’er

The dry leaf rustles in the brake, suspend

Her timid steps, to gaze upon a form

More graceful than her own.

His wandering step,

Obedient to high thoughts, has visited

The awful ruins of the days of old:

Athens, and Tyre, and Balbec, and the wasteShelley1824: 110

Where stood Jerusalem, the fallen towers

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Of Babylon, the eternal pyramids,

Memphis and Thebes, and whatsoe’er of strange

Sculptured on alabaster obelisk,

Or jaspar tomb, or mutilated sphinx,

Dark Ethiopia on her desart hills

Conceals. Among the ruined temples there,

Stupendous columns, and wild images

Of more than man, where marble demons watch

The Zodiac’s brazen mystery, and dead menShelley1824: 120

Hang their mute thoughts on the mute walls around,

He lingered, poring on memorials

Of the world’s youth, through the long burning day

Gazed on those speechless shapes, nor, when the moon

Filled the mysterious halls with floating shades

Suspended he that task, but ever gazed

And gazed, till meaning on his vacant mind

Flashed like strong inspiration, and he saw

The thrilling secrets of the birth of time.

Meanwhile an Arab maiden brought his food,Shelley1824: 130

Her daily portion, from her father’s tent,

And spread her matting for his couch, and stole

From duties and repose to tend his steps:—

Enamoured, yet not daring for deep awe

To speak her love:—and watched his nightly sleep,

Sleepless herself, to gaze upon his lips

Parted in slumber, whence the regular breath

Of innocent dreams arose: then, when red morn

Made paler the pale moon, to her cold home,

Wildered and wan and panting, she returned.Shelley1824: 140

The Poet wandering on, through Arabie

And Persia, and the wild Carmanian waste,

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And o’er the aërial mountains which pour down

Indus and Oxus from their icy caves,

In joy and exultation held his way;

Till in the vale of Cachmire, far within

Its loneliest dell, where odorous plants entwine

Beneath the hollow rocks a natural bower,

Beside a sparkling rivulet he stretched

His languid limbs. A vision on his sleepShelley1824: 150

There came, a dream of hopes that never yet

Had flushed his cheek. He dreamed a veiled maid

Sate near him, talking in low solemn tones.

Her voice was like the voice of his own soul

Heard in the calm of thought; its music long,

Like woven sounds of streams and breezes, held

His inmost sense suspended in its web

Of many-coloured woof and shifting hues.

Knowledge and truth and virtue were her theme,

And lofty hopes of divine liberty,Shelley1824: 160

Thoughts the most dear to him, and poesy,

Herself a poet. Soon the solemn mood

Of her pure mind kindled through all her frame

A permeating fire: wild numbers then

She raised, with voice stifled in tremulous sobs

Subdued by its own pathos: her fair hands

Were bare alone, sweeping from some strange harp

Strange symphony, and in their branching veins

The eloquent blood told an ineffable tale.

The beating of her heart was heard to fillShelley1824: 170

The pauses of her music, and her breath

Tumultuously accorded with those fits

Of intermitted song. Sudden she rose,

As if her heart impatiently endured

Its bursting burthen: at the sound he turned,

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And saw by the warm light of their own life

Her glowing limbs beneath the sinuous veil

Of woven wind, her outspread arms now bare,

Her dark locks floating in the breath of night,

Her beamy bending eyes, her parted lipsShelley1824: 180

Outstretched, and pale, and quivering eagerly.

His strong heart sunk and sickened with excess

Of love. He reared his shuddering limbs and quelled

His gasping breath, and spread his arms to meet

Her panting bosom:—she drew back awhile,

Then, yielding to the irresistible joy,

With frantic gesture and short breathless cry

Folded his frame in her dissolving arms.

Now blackness veiled his dizzy eyes, and night

Involved and swallowed up the vision; sleep,Shelley1824: 190

Like a dark flood suspended in its course,

Rolled back its impulse on his vacant brain.

Roused by the shock, he started from his trance—

The cold white light of morning, the blue moon

Low in the west, the clear and garish hills,

The distinct valley and the vacant woods,

Spread round where he stood.—Whither have fled

The hues of heaven that canopied his bower

Of yesternight? The sounds that soothed his sleep,

The mystery and the majesty of earth,Shelley1824: 200

The joy, the exultation? His wan eyes

Gaze on the empty scene as vacantly

As ocean’s moon looks on the moon in heaven.

The spirit of sweet human love has sent

A vision to the sleep of him who spurned

Her choicest gifts. He eagerly pursues

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Beyond the realms of dream that fleeting shade;

He overleaps the bound. Alas! Alas!

Were limbs and breath and being intertwined

Thus treacherously? Lost, lost, for ever lost,Shelley1824: 210

In the wide pathless desart of dim sleep,

That beautiful shape! does the dark gate of death

Conduct to thy mysterious paradise,

O Sleep? Does the bright arch of rainbow clouds,

And pendent mountains seen in the calm lake,

Lead only to a black and watery depth,

While death’s blue vault with loathliest vapours hung,

Where every shade which the foul grave exhales

Hides its dead eye from the detested day,

Conduct, O Sleep, to thy delightful realms?Shelley1824: 220

This doubt with sudden tide flowed on his heart,

The insatiate hope which it awakened, stung

His brain even like despair.

While day-light held

The sky, the Poet kept mute conference

With his still soul. At night the passion came,

Like the fierce fiend of a distempered dream,

And shook him from his rest, and led him forth

Into the darkness.—As an eagle grasped

In folds of the green serpent, feels her breastShelley1824: 230

Burn with the poison, and precipitates

Through night and day, tempest, and calm, and cloud,

Frantic with dizzying anguish, her blind flight

O’er the wide aëry wilderness: thus driven

By the bright shadow of that lovely dream,

Beneath the cold glare of the desolate night,

Through tangled swamps and deep precipitous dells,

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Startling with careless step the moon-light snake,

He fled.—Red morning dawned upon his flight,

Shedding the mockery of its vital huesShelley1824: 240

Upon his cheek of death. He wandered on

Till vast Aornos seen from Petra’s steep

Hung o’er the low horizon like a cloud;

Through Balk, and where the desolated tombs

Of Parthian kings scatter to every wind

Their wasting dust, wildly he wandered on,

Day after day, a weary waste of hours,

Bearing within his life the brooding care

That ever fed on its decaying flame.

And now his limbs were lean; his scattered hair,Shelley1824: 250

Sered by the autumn of strange suffering,

Sung dirges in the wind; his listless hand

Hung like dead bone within its withered skin;

Life, and the lustre that consumed it, shone

As in a furnace burning secretly

From his dark eyes alone. The cottagers,

Who ministered with human charity

His human wants, beheld with wondering awe

Their fleeting visitant. The mountaineer,

Encountering on some dizzy precipiceShelley1824: 260

That spectral form, deemed that the Spirit of wind

With lightning eyes, and eager breath, and feet

Disturbing not the drifted snow, had paused

In his career. The infant would conceal

His troubled visage in his mother’s robe

In terror at the glare of those wild eyes,

To remember their strange light in many a dream

Of after-times: but youthful maidens taught

By nature, would interpret half the woe

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That wasted him, would call him with false namesShelley1824: 270

Brother, and friend, would press his pallid hand

At parting, and watch, dim through tears, the path

Of his departure from their father’s door.

At length upon the lone Chorasmian shore

He paused, a wide and melancholy waste

Of putrid marshes—a strong impulse urged

His steps to the sea shore. A swan was there

Beside a sluggish stream among the reeds.

It rose as he approached, and with strong wings

Scaling the upward sky, bent its bright courseShelley1824: 280

High over the immeasurable main.

His eyes pursued its flight.—“Thou hast a home,

Beautiful bird, thou voyagest to thine home,

Where thy sweet mate will twine her downy neck

With thine, and welcome thy return with eyes

Bright in the lustre of their own fond joy.

And what am I that I should linger here

With voice far sweeter than thy dying notes,

Spirit more vast than thine, frame more attuned

To beauty, wasting these surpassing powersShelley1824: 290

In the deaf air, to the blind earth, and heaven

That echoes not my thoughts?” A gloomy smile

Of desperate hope wrinkled his quivering lips.

For sleep, he knew, kept most relentlessly

Its precious charge, and silent death exposed,

Faithless perhaps as sleep, a shadowy lure,

With doubtful smile mocking its own strange charms.

Startled by his own thoughts he looked around.

There was no fair fiend near him, not a sight

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Or sound of awe but in his own deep mind.Shelley1824: 300

A little shallop floating near the shore

Caught the impatient wandering of his gaze.

It had been long abandoned, for its sides

Gaped wide with many a rift, and its frail joints

Swayed with the undulations of the tide.

A restless impulse urged him to embark,

And meet lone Death on the drear ocean’s waste;

For well he knew that mighty Shadow loves

The slimy caverns of the populous deep.

The day was fair and sunny, sea and skyShelley1824: 310

Drank its inspiring radiance, and the wind

Swept strongly from the shore, blackening the waves.

Following his eager soul, the wanderer

Leaped in the boat, he spread his cloak aloft

On the bare mast, and took his lonely seat,

And felt the boat speed o’er the tranquil sea

Like a torn cloud before the hurricane.

As one that in a silver vision floats

Obedient to the sweep of odorous winds

Upon resplendent clouds, so rapidlyShelley1824: 320

Along the dark and ruffled waters fled

The straining boat.—A whirlwind swept it on,

With fierce gusts and precipitating force,

Through the white ridges of the chafed sea.

The waves arose. Higher and higher still

Their fierce necks writhed beneath the tempest’s scourge

Like serpents struggling in a vulture’s grasp.

Calm and rejoicing in the fearful war

Of wave ruining on wave, and blast on blast

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Descending, and black flood on whirlpool drivenShelley1824: 330

With dark obliterating course, he sate:

As if their genii were the ministers

Appointed to conduct him to the light

Of those beloved eyes, the Poet sate

Holding the steady helm. Evening came on,

The beams of sunset hung their rainbow hues

High ’mid the shifting domes of sheeted spray

That canopied his path o’er the waste deep;

Twilight, ascending slowly from the east,

Entwined in duskier wreaths her braided locksShelley1824: 340

O’er the fair front and radiant eyes of day;

Night followed, clad with stars. On every side

More horribly the multitudinous streams

Of ocean’s mountainous waste to mutual war

Rushed in dark tumult thundering, as to mock

The calm and spangled sky. The little boat

Still fled before the storm; still fled, like foam

Down the steep cataract of a wintry river;

Now pausing on the edge of the riven wave;

Now leaving far behind the bursting massShelley1824: 350

That fell, convulsing ocean. Safely fled—

As if that frail and wasted human form,

Had been an elemental god.

At midnight

The moon arose: and lo! the ethereal cliffs

Of Caucasus, whose icy summits shone

Among the stars like sunlight, and around

Whose caverned base the whirlpools and the waves

Bursting and eddying irresistibly

Rage and resound for ever.—Who shall save?Shelley1824: 360

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The boat fled on,—the boiling torrent drove,—

The crags closed round with black and jagged arms,

The shattered mountain overhung the sea,

And faster still, beyond all human speed,

Suspended on the sweep of the smooth wave,

The little boat was driven. A cavern there

Yawned, and amid its slant and winding depths

Ingulphed the rushing sea. The boat fled on

With unrelaxing speed. “Vision and Love!”

The Poet cried aloud, “I have beheldShelley1824: 370

The path of thy departure. Sleep and death

Shall not divide us long.”

The boat pursued

The windings of the cavern.—Day-light shone

At length upon that gloomy river’s flow;

Now, where the fiercest war among the waves

Is calm, on the unfathomable stream

The boat moved slowly. Where the mountain riven

Exposed those black depths to the azure sky,

Ere yet the flood’s enormous volume fellShelley1824: 380

Even to the base of Caucasus, with sound

That shook the everlasting rocks, the mass

Filled with one whirlpool all that ample chasm;

Stair above stair the eddying waters rose,

Circling immeasurably fast, and laved

With alternating dash the gnarled roots

Of mighty trees, that stretched their giant arms

In darkness over it. I’ the midst was left,

Reflecting, yet distorting every cloud,

A pool of treacherous and tremendous calm.Shelley1824: 390

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Seized by the sway of the ascending stream,

With dizzy swiftness, round, and round, and round,

Ridge after ridge the straining boat arose,

Till on the verge of the extremest curve,

Where through an opening of the rocky bank,

The waters overflow, and a smooth spot

Of glassy quiet mid those battling tides

Is left, the boat paused shuddering. Shall it sink

Down the abyss? Shall the reverting stress

Of that resistless gulph embosom it?Shelley1824: 400

Now shall it fall? A wandering stream of wind,

Breathed from the west, has caught the expanded sail,

And, lo! with gentle motion between banks

Of mossy slope, and on a placid stream,

Beneath a woven grove, it sails, and, hark!

The ghastly torrent mingles its far roar

With the breeze murmuring in the musical woods.

Where the embowering trees recede, and leave

A little space of green expanse, the cove

Is closed by meeting banks, whose yellow flowersShelley1824: 410

Forever gaze on their own drooping eyes,

Reflected in the crystal calm. The wave

Of the boat’s motion marred their pensive task,

Which nought but vagrant bird, or wanton wind,

Or falling spear-grass, or their own decay

Had e’er disturbed before. The Poet longed

To deck with their bright hues his withered hair,

But on his heart its solitude returned,

And he forebore. Not the strong impulse hid

In those flushed cheeks, bent eyes, and shadowy frame,Shelley1824: 420

Had yet performed its ministry: it hung

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Upon his life, as lightning in a cloud

Gleams, hovering ere it vanish, ere the floods

Of night close over it.

The noonday sun

Now shone upon the forest, one vast mass

Of mingling shade, whose brown magnificence

A narrow vale embosoms. There, huge caves,

Scooped in the dark base of those aëry rocks

Mocking its moans, respond and roar for ever.Shelley1824: 430

The meeting boughs and implicated leaves

Wove twilight o’er the Poet’s path, as led

By love, or dream, or god, or mightier Death,

He sought in Nature’s dearest haunt, some bank,

Her cradle, and his sepulchre. More dark

And dark the shades accumulate—the oak,

Expanding its immeasurable arms,

Embraces the light beech. The pyramids

Of the tall cedar overarching, frame

Most solemn domes within, and far below,Shelley1824: 440

Like clouds suspended in an emerald sky,

The ash and the acacia floating hang

Tremulous and pale. Like restless serpents, clothed

In rainbow and in fire, the parasites,

Starred with ten thousand blossoms, flow around

The gray trunks, and as gamesome infants’ eyes,

With gentle meanings, and most innocent wiles,

Fold their beams round the hearts of those that love,

These twine their tendrils with the wedded boughs,

Uniting their close union; the woven leavesShelley1824: 450

Make net-work of the dark blue light of day,

And the night’s noontide clearness, mutable

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As shapes in the wierd clouds. Soft mossy lawns

Beneath these canopies extend their swells,

Fragrant with perfumed herbs, and eyed with blooms

Minute yet beautiful. One darkest glen

Sends from its woods of musk-rose, twined with jasmine,

A soul-dissolving odour, to invite

To some more lovely mystery. Through the dell,

Silence and Twilight here, twin-sisters, keepShelley1824: 460

Their noonday watch, and sail among the shades

Like vaporous shapes half seen; beyond, a well,

Dark, gleaming, and of most translucent wave,

Images all the woven boughs above,

And each depending leaf, and every speck

Of azure sky, darting between their chasms;

Nor aught else in the liquid mirror laves

Its portraiture, but some inconstant star

Between one foliaged lattice twinkling fair,

Or, painted bird, sleeping beneath the moon,Shelley1824: 470

Or gorgeous insect floating motionless,

Unconscious of the day, ere yet his wings

Have spread their glories to the gaze of noon.

Hither the Poet came. His eyes beheld

Their own wan light through the reflected lines

Of his thin hair, distinct in the dark depth

Of that still fountain; as the human heart,

Gazing in dreams over the gloomy grave,

Sees its own treacherous likeness there. He heard

The motion of the leaves, the grass that sprungShelley1824: 480

Startled and glanced and trembled even to feel

An unaccustomed presence, and the sound

Of the sweet brook that from the secret springs

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Of that dark fountain rose. A Spirit seemed

To stand beside him—clothed in no bright robes

Of shadowy silver or enshrining light,

Borrowed from aught the visible world affords

Of grace, or majesty, or mystery;—

But, undulating woods, and silent well,

And reaping rivulet, and evening gloomShelley1824: 490

Now deepening the dark shades, for speech assuming

Held commune with him, as if he and it

Were all that was,—only . . . when his regard

Was raised by intense pensiveness . . . two eyes,

Two starry eyes, hung in the gloom of thought,

And seemed with their serene and azure smiles

To beckon him.

Obedient to the light

That shone within his soul, he went, pursuing

The windings of the dell.—The rivuletShelley1824: 500

Wanton and wild, through many a green ravine

Beneath the forest flowed. Sometimes it fell

Among the moss with hollow harmony

Dark and profound. Now on the polished stones

It danced; like childhood laughing as it went:

Then through the plain in tranquil wanderings crept,

Reflecting every herb and drooping bud

That overhung its quietness.—“O stream!

Whose source is inaccessibly profound,

Whither do thy mysterious waters tend?Shelley1824: 510

Thou imagest my life. Thy darksome stillness,

Thy dazzling waves, thy loud and hollow gulphs,

Thy searchless fountain and invisible course

Have each their type in me: And the wide sky,

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And measureless ocean may declare as soon

What oozy cavern or what wandering cloud

Contains thy waters, as the universe

Tell where these livingthoughts reside, when stretched

Upon thy flowers my bloodless limbs shall waste

I’ the passing wind!”Shelley1824: 520

Beside the grassy shore

Of the small stream he went; he did impress

On the green moss his tremulous step, that caught

Strong shuddering from his burning limbs. As one

Roused by some joyous madness from the couch

Of fever, he did move; yet, not like him,

Forgetful of the grave, where, when the flame

Of his frail exultation shall be spent,

He must descend. With rapid steps he went

Beneath the shade of trees, beside the flowShelley1824: 530

Of the wild babbling rivulet; and now

The forest’s solemn canopies were changed

For the uniform and lightsome evening sky.

Gray rocks did peep from the spare moss, and stemmed

The struggling brook: tall spires of windlestrae

Threw their thin shadows down the rugged slope,

And nought but gnarled roots of ancient pines,

Branchless and blasted, clenched with grasping roots

The unwilling soil. A gradual change was here,

Yet ghastly. For, as fast years flow away,Shelley1824: 540

The smooth brow gathers, and the hair grows thin

And white; and where irradiate dewy eyes

Had shone, gleam stony orbs: so from his steps

Bright flowers departed, and the beautiful shade

Of the green groves, with all their odorous winds

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And musical motions. Calm, he still pursued

The stream, that with a larger volume now

Rolled through the labyrinthine dell; and there

Fretted a path through its descending curves

With its wintry speed. On every side now roseShelley1824: 550

Rocks, which, in unimaginable forms,

Lifted their black and barren pinnacles

In the light of evening, and its precipice

Obscuring the ravine, disclosed above,

’Mid toppling stones, black gulphs, and yawning caves,

Whose windings gave ten thousand various tongues

To the loud stream. Lo! Where the pass expands

Its stony jaws, the abrupt mountain breaks,

And seems, with its accumulated crags,

To overhang the world: for wide expandShelley1824: 560

Beneath the wan stars and descending moon

Islanded seas, blue mountains, mighty streams,

Dim tracts and vast, robed in the lustrous gloom

Of leaden-coloured even, and fiery hills

Mingling their flames with twilight, on the verge

Of the remote horizon. The near scene,

In naked and severe simplicity,

Made contrast with the universe. A pine,

Rock-rooted, stretched athwart the vacancy

Its swinging boughs, to each inconstant blastShelley1824: 570

Yielding one only response at each pause,

In most familiar cadence, with the howl

The thunder and the hiss of homeless streams

Mingling its solemn song, whilst the broad river,

Foaming and hurrying o’er its rugged path,

Fell into that immeasurable void

Scattering its waters to the passing winds.

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Yet the gray precipice, and solemn pine

And torrent, were not all;—one silent nook

Was there. Even on the edge of that vast mountain,Shelley1824: 580

Upheld by knotty roots and fallen rocks,

It overlooked in its serenity

The dark earth, and the bending vault of stars.

It was a tranquil spot, that seemed to smile

Even in the lap of horror. Ivy clasped

The fissured stones with its entwining arms,

And did embower with leaves for ever green,

And berries dark, the smooth and even space

Of its inviolated floor; and here

The children of the autumnal whirlwind bore,Shelley1824: 590

In wanton sport, those bright leaves, whose decay,

Red, yellow, or etherially pale,

Rival the pride of summer. ’Tis the haunt

Of every gentle wind, whose breath can teach

The wilds to love tranquillity. One step,

One human step alone, has ever broken

The stillness of its solitude:—one voice

Alone inspired its echoes;—even that voice

Which hither came, floating among the winds,

And led the loveliest among human formsShelley1824: 600

To make their wild haunts the depository

Of all the grace and beauty that endued

Its motions, render up its majesty,

Scatter its music on the unfeeling storm,

And to the damp leaves and blue cavern mould,

Nurses of rainbow flowers and branching moss,

Commit the colours of that varying cheek,

That snowy breast, those dark and drooping eyes.

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The dim and horned moon hung low, and poured

A sea of lustre on the horizon’s vergeShelley1824: 610

That overflowed its mountains. Yellow mist

Filled the unbounded atmosphere, and drank

Wan moonlight even to fullness: not a star

Shone, not a sound was heard; the very winds,

Danger’s grim playmates, on that precipice

Slept, clasped in his embrace.—O, storm of death!

Whose sightless speed divides this sullen night:

And thou, colossal Skeleton, that, still

Guiding its irresistible career

In thy devastating omnipotence,Shelley1824: 620

Art king of this frail world, from the red field

Of slaughter, from the reeking hospital,

The patriot’s sacred couch, the snowy bed

Of innocence, the scaffold and the throne,

A mighty voice invokes thee. Ruin calls

His brother Death. A rare and regal prey

He hath prepared, prowling around the world;

Glutted with which thou mayst repose, and men

Go to their graves like flowers or creeping worms,

Nor ever more offer at thy dark shrineShelley1824: 630

The unheeded tribute of a broken heart.

When on the threshold of the green recess

The wanderer’s footsteps fell, he knew that death

Was on him. Yet a little, ere it fled,

Did he resign his high and holy soul

To images of the majestic past,

That paused within his passive being now,

Like winds that bear sweet music, when they breathe

Through some dim latticed chamber. He did place

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His pale lean hand upon the rugged trunkShelley1824: 640

Of the old pine. Upon an ivied stone

Reclined his languid head; his limbs did rest,

Diffused and motionless, on the smooth brink

Of that obscurest chasm;—and thus he lay,

Surrendering to their final impulses

The hovering powers of life. Hope and Despair,

The torturers, slept; no mortal pain or fear

Marred his repose, the influxes of sense,

And his own being unalloyed by pain,

Yet feebler and more feeble, calmly fedShelley1824: 650

The stream of thought, till he lay breathing there

At peace, and faintly smiling:—his last sight

Was the great moon, which o’er the western line

Of the wide world her mighty horn suspended,

With whose dun beams inwoven darkness seemed

To mingle. Now upon the jagged hills

It rests, and still as the divided frame

Of the vast meteor sunk, the Poet’s blood,

That ever beat in mystic sympathy

With nature’s ebb and flow, grew feebler still:Shelley1824: 660

And when two lessening points of light alone

Gleamed through the darkness, the alternate gasp

Of his faint respiration scarce did stir

The stagnate night:—till the minutest ray

Was quenched, the pulse yet lingered in his heart.

It paused—it fluttered. But when heaven remained

Utterly black, the murky shades involved

An image, silent, cold, and motionless,

As their own voiceless earth and vacant air.

Even as a vapour fed with golden beamsShelley1824: 670

That ministered on sunlight, ere the west

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Eclipses it, was now that wondrous frame—

No sense, no motion, no divinity—

A fragile lute, on whose harmonious strings

The breath of heaven did wander—a bright stream

Once fed with many-voiced waves—a dream

Of youth, which night and time have quenched for ever,

Still, dark, and dry, and unremembered now.

O, for Medea’s wondrous alchymy,

Which wheresoe’er it fell made the earth gleamShelley1824: 680

With bright flowers, and the wintry boughs exhale

From vernal blooms fresh fragrance! O, that God,

Profuse of poisons, would concede the chalice

Which but one living man has drained, who now,

Vessel of deathless wrath, a slave that feels

No proud exemption in the blighting curse

He bears, over the world wanders for ever,

Lone as incarnate death! O, that the dream

Of dark magician in his visioned cave,

Raking the cinders of a crucibleShelley1824: 690

For life and power, even when his feeble hand

Shakes in its last decay, were the true law

Of this so lovely world! But thou art fled

Like some frail exhalation, which the dawn

Robes in its golden beams,—ah! thou hast fled!

The brave, the gentle, and the beautiful,

The child of grace and genius. Heartless things

Are done and said i’the world, and many worms

And beasts and men live on, and mighty Earth

From sea and mountain, city and wilderness,Shelley1824: 700

In vesper low or joyous orison,

Lifts still its solemn voice:—but thou art fled—

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Thou canst no longer know or love the shapes

Of this phantasmal scene, who have to thee

Been purest ministers, who are, alas!

Now thou art not. Upon those pallid lips

So sweet even in their silence, on those eyes

That image sleep in death, upon that form

Yet safe from the worm’s outrage, let no tear

Be shed—not even in thought. Nor, when those huesShelley1824: 710

Are gone, and those divinest lineaments,

Worn by the senseless wind, shall live alone

In the frail pauses of this simple strain,

Let not high verse, mourning the memory

Of that which is no more, or painting’s woe

Or sculpture, speak in feeble imagery

Their own cold powers. Art and eloquence,

And all the shows o’the world are frail and vain

To weep a loss that turns their light to shade.

It is a woe too ‘deep for tears,’ when allShelley1824: 720

Is reft at once, when some surpassing Spirit,

Whose light adorned the world around it, leaves

Those who remain behind, nor sobs nor groans,

The passionate tumult of a clinging hope;

But pale despair and cold tranquillity,

Nature’s vast frame, the web of human things,

Birth and the grave, that are not as they were.Shelley1824: 727

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TRANSLATIONS.

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HYMN TO MERCURY.
TRANSLATED FROM THE GREEK OF HOMER

I.

Sing, Muse, the son of Maia and of Jove,

The Herald-child, king of Arcadia

And all its pastoral hills, whom in sweet love

Having been interwoven, modest May

Bore Heaven’s dread Supreme—an antique grove

Shadowed the cavern where the lovers lay

In the deep night, unseen by Gods or Men,

And white-armed Juno slumbered sweetly then.

II.

Now, when the joy of Jove had its fulfiling,

And Heaven’s tenth moon chronicled her relief,

She gave to light a babe all babes excelling,

A schemer subtle beyond all belief;

A shepherd of thin dreams, a cow-stealing,

A night-watching, and door-waylaying thief,

Who mongst the Gods was soon about to thieve

And other glorious actions to achieve.

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III.

The babe was born at the first peep of day;

He began playing on the lyre at noon,

And the same evening did he steal away

Apollo’s herds;—the fourth day of the moon

On which him bore the venerable May,

From her immortal limbs he leaped full soon,

Nor long could in the sacred cradle keep,

But out to seek Apollo’s herds would creep.

IV.

Out of the lofty cavern wandering

He found a tortoise, and cried out—“A treasure!”

(For Mercury first made the tortoise sing)

The beast before the portal at his leisure

The flowery herbage was depasturing,

Moving his feet in a deliberate measure

Over the turf. Jove’s profitable son

Eyeing him laughed, and laughing thus begun:—

V.

“A useful god-send are you to me now,

King of the dance, companion of the feast,

Lovely in all your nature! Welcome, you

Excellent plaything! Where, sweet mountain beast,

Got you that speckled shell? Thus much I know,

You must come home with me and be my guest;

You will give joy to me, and I will do

All that is in my power to honour you.

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VI.

“Better to be at home than out of door;—

So come with me, and though it has been said

That you alive defend from magic power,

I know you will sing sweetly when you’re dead.”

Thus having spoken, the quaint infant bore,

Lifting it from the grass on which it fed,

And grasping it in his delighted hold,

His treasured prize into the cavern old.

VII.

Then scooping with a chisel of grey steel

He bored the life and soul out of the beast—

Not swifter a swift thought of woe or weal

Darts through the tumult of a human breast

Which thronging cares annoy—not swifter wheel

The flashes of its torture and unrest

Out of the dizzy eyes—than Maia’s son

All that he did devise hath featly done.

VIII.

And through the tortoise’s hard strong skin

At proper distances small holes he made,

And fastened the cut stems of reeds within,

And with a piece of leather overlaid

The open space and fixed the cubits in,

Fitting the bridge to both, and stretched o’er all

Symphonious cords of sheep gut rhythmical.

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IX.

When he had wrought the lovely instrument,

He tried the chords, and made division meet

Preluding with the plectrum, and there went

Up from beneath his hand a tumult sweet

Of mighty sounds, and from his lips he sent

A strain of unpremeditated wit

Joyous and wild and wanton—such you may

Hear among revellers on a holiday.

X.

He sung how Jove and May of the bright sandal

Dallied in love not quite legitimate;

And his own birth, still scoffing at the scandal,

And naming his own name, did celebrate;

His mother’s cave and servant maids he planned all

In plastic verse, her household stuff and state,

Perennial pot, trippet, and brazen pan,—

But singing he conceived another plan.

XI.

Seized with a sudden fancy for fresh meat,

He in his sacred crib deposited

The hollow lyre, and from the cavern sweet

Rushed with great leaps up to the mountain’s head,

Revolving in his mind some subtle feat

Of thievish craft, such as a swindler might

Devise in the lone season of dun night.

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XII.

Lo! the great Sun under the ocean’s bed has

Driven steeds and chariot—the child meanwhile strode

O’er the Pierian mountains clothed in shadows,

Where the immortal oxen of the God

Are pastured in the flowering unmown meadows,

And safely stalled in a remote abode—

The archer Argicide, elate and proud,

Drove fifty from the herd, lowing aloud.

XIII.

He drove them wandering o’er the sandy way,

But, being ever mindful of his craft,

Backward and forward drove he them astray,

So that the tracks which seemed before, were aft;

His sandals then he threw to the ocean spray,

And for each foot he wrought a kind of raft

Of tamarisk, and tamarisk-like sprigs,

And bound them in a lump with withy twigs.

XIV.

And on his feet he tied these sandals light,

The trail of whose wide leaves might not betray

His track; and then, a self-sufficing wight,

Like a man hastening on some distant way,

He from Piera’s mountain bent his flight;

But an old man perceived the infant pass

Down green Onchestus heaped like beds with grass.

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XV.

The old man stood dressing his sunny vine:

“Halloo! old fellow with the crooked shoulder!

You grub those stumps? before they will bear wine

Methinks even you must grow a little older:

Attend, I pray, to this advice of mine,

As you would ’scape what might appal a bolder—

Seeing, see not—and hearing, hear not—and—

If you have understanding—understand.”

XVI.

So saying, Hermes roused the oxen vast;

O’er shadowy mountain and resounding dell,

And flower-paven plains, great Hermes past;

Till the black night divine, which favouring fell

Around his steps, grew grey, and morning fast

Wakened the world to work, and from her cell

Sea-strewn, the Pallantean Moon sublime

Into her watch-tower just began to climb.

XVII.

Now to Alpheus he had driven all

The broad-foreheaded oxen of the Sun;

They came unwearied to the lofty stall

And to the water troughs which ever run

Through the fresh fields—and when with rushgrass tall,

Lotus and all sweet herbage, every one

Had pastured been, the great God made them move

Towards the stall in a collected drove.

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XVIII.

A mighty pile of wood the God then heaped,

And having soon conceived the mystery

Of fire, from two smooth laurel branches stript

The bark, and rubbed them in his palms,—on high

Suddenly forth the burning vapour leapt,

And the divine child saw delightedly—

Mercury first found out for human weal

Tinder-box, matches, fire-irons, flint and steel.

XIX.

And fine dry logs and roots innumerous

He gathered in a delve upon the ground—

And kindled them—and instantaneous

The strength of the fierce flame was breathed around:

And whilst the might of glorious Vulcan thus

Wrapt the great pile with glare and roaring sound,

Hermes dragged forth two heifers, lowing loud,

Close to the fire—such might was in the God.

XX.

And on the earth upon their backs he threw

The panting beasts, and rolled them o’er and o’er,

And bored their lives out. Without more ado

He cut up fat and flesh, and down before

The fire, on spits of wood he placed the two,

Toasting their flesh and ribs, and all the gore

Pursed in the bowels; and while this was done

He stretched their hides over a craggy stone.

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XXI.

We mortals let an ox grow old, and then

Cut it up after long consideration,—

But joyous-minded Hermes from the glen

Drew the fat spoils to the more open station

Of a flat smooth space, and portioned them; and when

He had by lot assigned to each a ration

Of the twelve Gods, his mind became aware

Of all the joys which in religion are.

XXII.

For the sweet savour of the roasted meat

Tempted him though immortal. Nathelesse

He checked his haughty will and did not eat,

Though what it cost him words can scarce express,

And every wish to put such morsels sweet

Down his most sacred throat, he did repress;

But soon within the lofty portalled stall

He placed the fat and flesh and bones and all.

XXIII.

And every trace of the fresh butchery

And cooking, the God soon made disappear,

As if it all had vanished through the sky;

He burned the hoofs and horns and head and hair,

The insatiate fire devoured them hungrily;—

And when he saw that everything was clear,

He quenched the coals and trampled the black dust,

And in the stream his bloody sandals tossed.

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XXIV.

All night he worked in the serene moonshine—

But when the light of day was spread abroad

He sought his natal mountain peaks divine.

On his long wandering, neither man nor god

Had met him, since he killed Apollo’s kine,

Nor house-dog had barked at him on his road;

Now he obliquely through the key-hole past,

Like a thin mist, or an autumnal blast.

XXV.

Right through the temple of the spacious cave

He went with soft light feet—as if his tread

Fell not on earth; no sound their falling gave;

Then to his cradle he crept quick, and spread

The swaddling-clothes about him; and the knave

Lay playing with the covering of the bed

With his left hand about his knees—the right

Held his beloved tortoise-lyre tight.

XXVI.

There he lay innocent as a new born child,

As gossips say; but though he was a god,

The goddess, his fair mother, unbeguiled

Knew all that he had done being abroad:

“Whence come you, and from what adventure wild,

You cunning rogue, and where have you abode

All the long night, clothed in your impudence?

What have you done since you departed hence?

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XXVII.

“Apollo soon will pass within this gate

And bind your tender body in a chain

Inextricably tight, and fast as fate,

Unless you can delude the God again,

Even when within his arms—ah, runagate!

A pretty torment both for gods and men

Your father made when he made you!”—“Dear mother,”

Replied sly Hermes, “Wherefore scold and bother?

XXVIII.

“As if I were like other babes as old,

And understood nothing of what is what;

And cared at all to hear my mother scold.

I in my subtle brain a scheme have got,

Which whilst the sacred stars round Heaven are rolled

Will profit you and me—nor shall our lot

Be as you counsel, without gifts or food,

To spend our lives in this obscure abode.

XXIX.

“But we will leave this shadow-peopled cave

And live among the Gods, and pass each day

In high communion, sharing what they have

Of profuse wealth and unexhausted prey;

And from the portion which my father gave

To Phœbus, I will snatch my share away,

Which if my father will not—nathelesse I,

Who am the king of robbers, can but try.

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XXX.

“And, if Latona’s son should find me out,

I’ll countermine him by a deeper plan;

I’ll pierce the Pythian temple-walls, though stout,

And sack the fane of every thing I can—

Cauldrons and tripods of great worth no doubt,

Each golden cup and polished brazen pan,

All the wrought tapestries and garments gay.”—

So they together talked;—meanwhile the Day

XXXI.

Ætherial born arose out of the flood

Of flowing Ocean, bearing light to men.

Apollo past toward the sacred wood,

Which from the inmost depths of its green glen

Echoes the voice of Neptune,—and there stood

On the same spot in green Onchestus then

That same old animal, the vine-dresser,

Who was employed hedging his vineyard there.

XXXII.

Latona’s glorious Son began:—“I pray

Tell, ancient hedger of Onchestus green,

Whether a drove of kine has past this way,

All heifers with crooked horns? for they have been

Stolen from the herd in high Pieria,

Where a black bull was fed apart, between

Two woody mountains in a neighbouring glen,

And four fierce dogs watched there, unanimous as men.

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XXXIII.

“And, what is strange, the author of this theft

Has stolen the fatted heifers every one,

But the four dogs and the black bull are left:—

Stolen they were last night at set of sun,

Of their soft beds and their sweet food bereft—

Now tell me, man born ere the world begun,

Have you seen any one pass with the cows?”—

To whom the man of overhanging brows:

XXXIV.

“My friend, it would require no common skill

Justly to speak of everything I see:

On various purposes of good or ill

Many pass by my vineyard,—and to me

’Tis difficult to know the invisible

Thoughts, which in all those many minds may be:—

Thus much alone I certainly can say,

I tilled these vines till the decline of day.

XXXV.

“And then I thought I saw, but dare not speak

With certainty of such a wondrous thing,

A child, who could not have been born a week,

Those fair-horned cattle closely following,

And in his hand he held a polished stick:

And, as on purpose, he walked wavering

From one side to the other of the road,

And with his face opposed the steps he trod.”

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XXXVI.

Apollo hearing this, past quickly on—

No winged omen could have shown more clear

That the deceiver was his father’s son.

So the God wraps a purple atmosphere

Around his shoulders, and like fire is gone

To famous Pylos, seeking his kine there,

And found their track and his, yet hardly cold,

And cried—“What wonder do mine eyes behold!

XXXVII.

“Here are the footsteps of the horned herd

Turned back towards their fields of asphodel;—

But these! are not the tracks of beast or bird,

Grey wolf, or bear, or lion of the dell,

Or maned Centaur—sand was never stirred

By man or woman thus! Inexplicable!

Who with unwearied feet could e’er impress

The sand with such enormous vestiges?

XXXVIII.

“That was most strange—but this is stranger still!”

Thus having said, Phœbus impetuously

Sought high Cyllene’s forest-cinctured hill,

And the deep cavern where dark shadows lie,

And where the ambrosial nymph with happy will

Bore the Saturnian’s love-child, Mercury—

And a delightful odour from the dew

Of the hill pastures, at his coming, flew.

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XXXIX.

And Phœbus stooped under the craggy roof

Arched over the dark cavern:—Maia’s child

Perceived that he came angry, far aloof,

About the cows of which he had been beguiled,

And over him the fine and fragrant woof

Of his ambrosial swaddling clothes he piled—

As among fire-brands lies a burning spark

Covered, beneath the ashes cold and dark.

XL.

There, like an infant who had sucked his fill

And now was newly washed and put to bed,

Awake, but courting sleep with weary will,

And gathered in a lump hands, feet, and head,

He lay, and his beloved tortoise still

He grasped and held under his shoulder-blade.

Phœbus the lovely mountain-goddess knew,

Not less her subtle, swindling baby, who

XLI.

Lay swathed in his sly wiles. Round every crook

Of the ample cavern, for his kine, Apollo

Looked sharp; and when he saw them not, he took

The glittering key, and opened three great hollow

Recesses in the rock—where many a nook

Was filled with the sweet food immortals swallow,

And mighty heaps of silver and of gold

Were piled within—a wonder to behold!

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XLII.

And white and silver robes, all overwrought

With cunning workmanship of tracery sweet—

Except among the Gods there can be nought

In the wide world to be compared with it.

Latona’s offspring, after having sought

His herds in every corner, thus did greet

Great Hermes:—“Little cradled rogue, declare

Of my illustrious heifers, where they are!

XLIII.

“Speak quickly! or a quarrel between us

Must rise, and the event will be, that I

Shall hawl you into dismal Tartarus,

In fiery gloom to dwell eternally;

Nor shall your father nor your mother loose

The bars of that black dungeon—utterly

You shall be cast out from the light of day,

To rule the ghosts of men, unblest as they.”

XLIV.

To whom thus Hermes slily answered:—“Son

Of great Latona, what a speech is this!

Why come you here to ask me what is done

With the wild oxen which it seems you miss?

I have not seen them, nor from any one

Have heard a word of the whole business;

If you should promise an immense reward,

I could not tell more than you now have heard.

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XLV.

“An ox-stealer should be both tall and strong,

And I am but a little new-born thing,

Who, yet at least, can think of nothing wrong:—

My business is to suck, and sleep, and fling

The cradle-clothes about me all day long,—

Or half asleep, hear my sweet mother sing,

And to be washed in water clean and warm,

And hushed and kissed and kept secure from harm.

XLVI.

“O, let not e’er this quarrel be averred!

The astounded Gods would laugh at you, if e’er

You should allege a story so absurd,

As that a new-born infant forth could fare

Out of his home after a savage herd.

I was born yesterday—my small feet are

Too tender for the roads so hard and rough:—

And if you think that this is not enough,

XLVII.

“I swear a great oath, by my father’s head,

That I stole not your cows, and that I know

Of no one else, who might, or could, or did.—

Whatever things cows are, I do not know,

For I have only heard the name.”—This said,

He winked as fast as could be, and his brow

Was wrinkled, and a whistle loud gave he,

Like one who hears some strange absurdity.

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XLVIII.

Apollo gently smiled and said:—“Aye, aye,—

You cunning little rascal, you will bore

Many a rich man’s house, and your array

Of thieves will lay their siege before his door,

Silent as night, in night; and many a day

In the wild glens rough shepherds will deplore

That you or yours, having an appetite,

Met with their cattle, comrade of the night!

XLIX.

“And this among the Gods shall be your gift,

To be considered as the lord of those

Who swindle, house-break, sheep-steal, and shop-lift;—

But now if you would not your last sleep dose,

Crawl out!”—Thus saying, Phœbus did uplift

The subtle infant in his swaddling clothes,

And in his arms, according to his wont,

A scheme devised the illustrious Argiphont.

L.

* * * * *

* * * *

And sneezed and shuddered—Phœbus on the grass

Him threw, and whilst all that he had designed

He did perform—eager although to pass,

Apollo darted from his mighty mind

Towards the subtle babe the following scoff:—

“Do not imagine this will get you off,

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LI.

“You little swaddled child of Jove and May!”

And seized him:—“By this omen I shall trace

My noble herds, and you shall lead the way.”—

Cyllenian Hermes from the grassy place,

Like one in earnest haste to get away,

Rose, and with hands lifted towards his face

Roused both his ears—up from his shoulders drew

His swaddling clothes, and—“What mean you to do

LII.

“With me, you unkind God?”—said Mercury:

“Is it about these cows you teize me so?

I wished the race of cows were perished!—I

Stole not your cows—I do not even know

What things cows are. Alas! I well may sigh,

That since I came into this world of woe,

I should have ever heard the name of one—

But I appeal to the Saturnian’s throne.”

LIII.

Thus Phœbus and the vagrant Mercury

Talked without coming to an explanation,

With adverse purpose. As for Phœbus, he

Sought not revenge, but only information,

And Hermes tried with lies and roguery

To cheat Apollo—But when no evasion

Served—for the cunning one his match had found—

He paced on first over the sandy ground.

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LIV.

He of the Silver Bow the child of Jove

Followed behind, till to their heavenly Sire

Came both his children—beautiful as Love,

And from his equal balance did require

A judgment in the cause wherein they strove.

O’er odorous Olympus and its snows

A murmuring tumult as they came arose,—

LV.

And from the folded depths of the great Hill,

While Hermes and Apollo reverent stood

Before Jove’s throne, the indestructible

Immortals rushed in mighty multitude;

And whilst their seats in order due they fill,

The lofty Thunderer in a careless mood

To Phœbus said:—“Whence drive you this sweet prey,

This herald-baby, born but yesterday?—

LVI.

“A most important subject, trifler, this

To lay before the Gods!”—“Nay, father, nay,

When you have understood the business,

Say not that I alone am fond of prey.

I found this little boy in a recess

Under Cyllene’s mountains far away—

A manifest and most apparent thief,

A scandal-monger beyond all belief.

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LVII.

“I never saw his like either in heaven

Or upon earth for knavery or craft:—

Out of the field my cattle yester-even,

By the low shore on which the loud sea laughed,

He right down to the river-ford had driven;

And mere astonishment would make you daft

To see the double kind of footsteps strange

He has impressed wherever he did range.

LVIII.

“The cattle’s track on the black dust, full well

Is evident, as if they went towards

The place from which they came—that asphodel

Meadow, in which I feed my many herds,—

His steps were most incomprehensible—

I know not how I can describe in words

Those tracks—he could have gone along the sands

Neither upon his feet nor on his hands;—

LIX.

“He must have had some other stranger mode

Of moving on: those vestiges immense,

Far as I traced them on the sandy road,

Seemed like the trail of oak-toppings:—but thence

No mark or track denoting where they trod

The hard ground gave:—but, working at his fence,

A mortal hedger saw him as he past

To Pylos, with the cows, in fiery haste.

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LX.

“I found that in the dark he quietly

Had sacrificed some cows, and before light

Had thrown the ashes all dispersedly

About the road—then, still as gloomy night,

Had crept into his cradle, either eye

Rubbing, and cogitating some new sleight.

No eagle could have seen him as he lay

Hid in his cavern from the peering day.

LXI.

“I tax’d him with the fact, when he averred

Most solemnly that he did neither see

Or even had in any manner heard

Of my lost cows, whatever things cows be;

Nor could he tell, though offered a reward,

Not even who could tell of them to me.”

So speaking, Phœbus sate; and Hermes then

Addressed the Supreme Lord of Gods and Men:—

LXII.

“Great Father, you know clearly before hand

That all which I shall say to you is soothe;

I am a most veracious person, and

Totally unacquainted with untruth.

At sunrise, Phœbus came, but with no band

Of Gods to bear him witness, in great wrath,

To my abode, seeking his heifers there,

And saying that I must show him where they are,

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LXIII.

“Or he would hurl me down the dark abyss.

I know, that every Apollonian limb

Is clothed with speed and might and manliness,

As a green bank with flowers—but unlike him

I was born yesterday, and you may guess

He well knew this when he indulged the whim

Of bullying a poor little new-born thing

That slept, and never thought of cow-driving.

LXIV.

“Am I like a strong fellow who steals kine?

Believe me, dearest Father, such you are,

This driving of the herds is none of mine;

Across my threshhold did I wander ne’er,

So may I thrive! I reverence the divine

Sun and the Gods, and I love you, and care

Even for this hard accuser—who must know

I am as innocent as they or you.

LXV.

“I swear by these most gloriously-wrought portals—

(It is, you will allow, an oath of might)

Through which the multitude of the Immortals

Pass and repass forever, day and night,

Devising schemes for the affairs of mortals—

That I am guiltless; and I will requite,

Although mine enemy be great and strong,

His cruel threat—do thou defend the young!”

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LXVI.

So speaking, the Cyllenian Argiphont

Winked, as if now his adversary was fitted:—

And Jupiter according to his wont,

Laughed heartily to hear the subtle-witted

Infant give such a plausible account,

And every word a lie. But he remitted

Judgment at present—and his exhortation

Was, to compose the affair by arbitration.

LXVII.

And they by mighty Jupiter were bidden

To go forth with a single purpose both,

Neither the other chiding nor yet chidden:

And Mercury with innocence and truth

To lead the way, and show where he had hidden

The mighty heifers.—Hermes, nothing loth,

Obeyed the Ægis-bearer’s will—for he

Is able to persuade all easily.

LXVIII.

These lovely children of Heaven’s highest Lord

Hastened to Pylos and the pastures wide

And lofty stalls by the Alphean ford,

Where wealth in the mute night is multiplied

With silent growth. Whilst Hermes drove the herd

Out of the stony cavern, Phœbus spied

The hides of those the little babe had slain,

Stretched on the precipice above the plain.

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LXIX.

“How was it possible,” then Phœbus said,

“That you, a little child, born yesterday,

A thing on mother’s milk and kisses fed,

Could two prodigious heifers ever flay?

Even I myself may well hereafter dread

Your prowess, offspring of Cyllenian May,

When you grow strong and tall.”—He spoke, and bound

Stiff withy bands the infant’s wrists around.

LXX.

He might as well have bound the oxen wild;

The withy bands, though starkly interknit,

Fell at the feet of the immortal child,

Loosened by some device of his quick wit.

Phœbus perceived himself again beguiled,

And stared—while Hermes sought some hole or pit,

Looking askance and winking fast as thought,

Where he might hide himself and not be caught.

LXXI.

Sudden he changed his plan, and with strange skill

Subdued the strong Latonian, by the might

Of winning music, to his mightier will;

His left hand held the lyre, and in his right

The plectrum struck the chords—unconquerable

Up from beneath his hand in circling flight

The gathering music rose—and sweet as Love

The penetrating notes did live and move

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LXXII.

Within the heart of great Apollo—he

Listened with all his soul, and laughed for pleasure.

Close to his side stood harping fearlessly

The unabashed boy; and to the measure

Of the sweet lyre, there followed loud and free

His joyous voice; for he unlocked the treasure

Of his deep song, illustrating the birth

Of the bright Gods and the dark desart Earth:

LXXIII.

And how to the Immortals every one

A portion was assigned of all that is;

But chief Mnemosyne did Maia’s son

Clothe in the light of his loud melodies;—

And as each God was born or had begun

He in their order due and fit degrees

Sung of his birth and being—and did move

Apollo to unutterable love.

LXXIV.

These words were winged with his swift delight:

“You heifer-stealing schemer, well do you

Deserve that fifty oxen should requite

Such minstrelsies as I have heard even now.

Comrade of feasts, little contriving wight,

One of your secrets I would gladly know,

Whether the glorious power you now show forth

Was folded up within you at your birth,

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LXXV.

“Or whether mortal taught or God inspired

The power of unpremeditated song?

Many divinest sounds have I admired,

The Olympian Gods and mortal men among;

But such a strain of wondrous, strange, untired,

And soul-awakening music, sweet and strong,

Yet did I never hear except from thee,

Offspring of May, impostor Mercury!

LXXVI.

“What Muse, what skill, what unimagined use,

What exercise of subtlest art, has given

Thy songs such power?—for those who hear may choose

From three, the choicest of the gifts of Heaven,

Delight, and love, and sleep,—sweet sleep, whose dews

Are sweeter than the balmy tears of even:—

And I, who speak this praise, am that Apollo

Whom the Olympian Muses ever follow:

LXXVII.

“And their delight is dance, and the blithe noise

Of song and overflowing poesy;

And sweet, even as desire, the liquid voice

Of pipes, that fills the clear air thrillingly;

But never did my inmost soul rejoice

In this dear work of youthful revelry,

As now I wonder at thee, son of Jove;

Thy harpings and thy song are soft as love.

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LXXVIII.

“Now since thou hast, although so very small,

Science of arts so glorious, thus I swear,

And let this cornel javelin, keen and tall,

Witness between us what I promise here,—

That I will lead thee to the Olympian Hall,

Honoured and mighty, with thy mother dear,

And many glorious gifts in joy will give thee,

And even at the end will ne’er deceive thee.”

LXXIX.

To whom thus Mercury with prudent speech:—

“Wisely hast thou enquired of my skill:

I envy thee no thing I know to teach

Even this day:—for both in word and will

I would be gentle with thee; thou canst reach

All things in thy wise spirit, and thy sill

Is highest in heaven among the sons of Jove,

Who loves thee in the fulness of his love.

LXXX.

“The Counsellor Supreme has given to thee

Divinest gifts, out of the amplitude

Of his profuse exhaustless treasury;

By thee, ’tis said, the depths are understood

Of his far voice; by thee the mystery

Of all oracular fates,—and the dread mood

Of the diviner is breathed up, even I—

A child—perceive thy might and majesty—

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LXXXI.

“Thou canst seek out and compass all that wit

Can find or teach;—yet since thou wilt, come take

The lyre—be mine the glory giving it—

Strike the sweet chords, and sing aloud, and wake

Thy joyous pleasure out of many a fit

Of tranced sound—and with fleet fingers make

Thy liquid-voiced comrade talk with thee,

It can talk measured music eloquently.

LXXXII.

“Then bear it boldly to the revel loud,

Love-wakening dance, or feast of solemn state,

A joy by night or day—for those endowed

With art and wisdom who interrogate

It teaches, babbling in delightful mood

All things which make the spirit most elate,

Soothing the mind with sweet familiar play,

Chasing the heavy shadows of dismay.

LXXXIII.

“To those who are unskilled in its sweet tongue,

Though they should question most impetuously

Its hidden soul, it gossips something wrong—

Some senseless and impertinent reply.

But thou who art as wise as thou art strong

Can compass all that thou desirest. I

Present thee with this music-flowing shell,

Knowing thou canst interrogate it well.

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LXXXIV.

“And let us two henceforth together feed

On this green mountain slope and pastoral plain,

The herds in litigation—they will breed

Quickly enough to recompense our pain,

If to the bulls and cows we take good heed;—

And thou, though somewhat over fond of gain,

Grudge me not half the profit.”—Having spoke,

The shell he proffered, and Apollo took.

LXXXV.

And gave him in return the glittering lash,

Installing him as herdsman;—from the look

Of Mercury then laughed a joyous flash.

And then Apollo with the plectrum strook

The chords, and from beneath his hands a crash

Of mighty sounds rushed up, whose music shook

The soul with sweetness, as of an adept

His sweeter voice a just accordance kept.

LXXXVI.

The herd went wandering o’er the divine mead,

Whilst these most beautiful Sons of Jupiter

Won their swift way up to the snowy head

Of white Olympus, with the joyous lyre

Soothing their journey; and their father dread

Gathered them both into familiar

Affection sweet,—and then, and now, and ever,

Hermes must love Him of the Golden Quiver,

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LXXXVII.

To whom he gave the lyre that sweetly sounded,

Which skilfully he held and played thereon.

He piped the while, and far and wide rebounded

The echo of his pipings; every one

Of the Olympians sat with joy astounded,

While he conceived another piece of fun,

One of his old tricks—which the God of Day

Perceiving, said:—“I fear thee, Son of May;—

LXXXVIII.

“I fear thee and thy sly camelion spirit,

Lest thou should steal my lyre and crooked bow;

This glory and power thou dost from Jove inherit,

To teach all craft upon the earth below;

Thieves love and worship thee—it is thy merit

To make all mortal business ebb and flow

By roguery:—now, Hermes, if you dare,

By sacred Styx a mighty oath to swear

LXXXIX.

“That you will never rob me, you will do

A thing extremely pleasing to my heart.”

Then Mercury sware by the Stygian dew,

That he would never steal his bow or dart,

Or lay his hands on what to him was due,

Or ever would employ his powerful art

Against his Pythian fane. Then Phœbus swore

There was no God or man whom he loved more.

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XC.

“And I will give thee as a good-will token,

The beautiful wand of wealth and happiness;

A perfect three-leaved rod of gold unbroken,

Whose magic will thy footsteps ever bless;

And whatsoever by Jove’s voice is spoken

Of earthly or divine from its recess,

It, like a loving soul to thee will speak,

And more than this, do thou forbear to seek.

XCI.

“For, dearest child, the divinations high

Which thou requirest, ’tis unlawful ever

That thou, or any other deity

Should understand—and vain were the endeavour;

For they are hidden in Jove’s mind, and I

In trust of them, have sworn that I would never

Betray the counsels of Jove’s inmost will

To any God—the oath was terrible.

XCII.

“Then, golden-wanded brother, ask me not

To speak the fates by Jupiter designed;

But be it mine to tell their various lot

To the unnumbered tribes of human kind.

Let good to these, and ill to those be wrought

As I dispense—but he who comes consigned

By voice and wings of perfect augury

To my great shrine, shall find avail in me.

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XCIII.

“Him will I not deceive, but will assist;

But he who comes relying on such birds

As chatter vainly, who would strain and twist

The purpose of the Gods with idle words,

And deems their knowledge light, he shall have mist

His road—whilst I among my other hoards

His gifts deposit. Yet, O son of May,

I have another wondrous thing to say.

XCIV.

“There are three Fates, three virgin Sisters, who

Rejoicing in their wind-outspeeding wings,

Their heads with flour snowed over white and new,

Sit in a vale round which Parnassus flings

Its circling skirts—from these I have learned true

Vaticinations of remotest things.

My father cared not. Whilst they search out dooms,

They sit apart and feed on honeycombs.

XCV.

“They, having eaten the fresh honey, grow

Drunk with divine enthusiasm, and utter

With earnest willingness the truth they know;

But if deprived of that sweet food, they mutter

All plausible delusions;—these to you

I give;—if you inquire, they will not stutter;

Delight your own soul with them:—any man

You would instruct, may profit, if he can.

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XCVI.

“Take these and the fierce oxen, Maia’s child—

O’er many a horse and toil-enduring mule,

O’er jagged-jawed lions, and the wild

White-tusked boars, o’er all, by field or pool,

Of cattle which the mighty Mother mild

Nourishes in her bosom, thou shalt rule—

Thou dost alone the veil of death uplift—

Thou givest not—yet this is a great gift.”

XCVII.

Thus king Apollo loved the child of May

In truth, and Jove covered them with love and joy.

Hermes with Gods and men even from that day

Mingled, and wrought the latter much annoy,

And little profit, going far astray

Through the dun night. Farewell, delightful Boy,

Of Jove and Maia sprung,—never by me,

Nor thou, nor other songs shall unremembered be.

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THE CYCLOPS;
A SATYRIC DRAMA.

TRANSLATED FROM THE GREEK OF EURIPIDES.

Silenus.

Chorus of Satyrs.

Ulysses.

The Cyclops.

silenus.

O, Bacchus, what a world of toil, both now

And ere these limbs were overworn with age,

Have I endured for thee! First, when thou fled’st

The mountain-nymphs who nurst thee, driven afar

By the strange madness Juno sent upon thee;

Then in the battle of the sons of Earth,

When I stood foot by foot close to thy side,

No unpropitious fellow combatant,

And driving through his shield my winged spear,

Slew vast Enceladus. Consider now,

Is it a dream of which I speak to thee?

By Jove it is not, for you have the trophies!

And now I suffer more than all before.

For when I heard that Juno had devised

A tedious voyage for you, I put to sea

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With all my children quaint in search of you,

And I myself stood on the beaked prow

And fixed the naked mast, and all my boys

Leaning upon their oars, with splash and strain

Made white with foam the green and purple sea,—

And so we sought you, king. We were sailing

Near Malea, when an eastern wind arose,

And drove us to this wild Ætnean rock;

The one-eyed children of the Ocean God,

The man-destroying Cyclopses inhabit,

On this wild shore, their solitary caves,

And one of these, named Polypheme, has caught us

To be his slaves; and so, for all delight

Of Bacchic sports, sweet dance and melody,

We keep this lawless giant’s wandering flocks.

My sons indeed, on far declivities,

Young things themselves, tend on the youngling sheep,

But I remain to fill the water casks,

Or sweeping the hard floor, or ministering

Some impious and abominable meal

To the fell Cyclops. I am wearied of it!

And now I must scrape up the littered floor

With this great iron rake, so to receive

My absent master and his evening sheep

In a cave neat and clean. Even now I see

My children tending the flocks hitherward.

Ha! what is this? are your Sicinnian measures

Even now the same, as when with dance and song

You brought young Bacchus to Athæa’s halls?

* * * * *

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chorus of satyrs.

STROPHE.

Where has he of race divine

Wandered in the winding rocks?

Here the air is calm and fine

For the father of the flocks;—

Here the grass is soft and sweet,

And the river-eddies meet

In the trough beside the cave,

Bright as in their fountain wave.—

Neither here, nor on the dew

Of the lawny uplands feeding?

Oh, you come!—a stone at you

Will I throw to mend your breeding;—

Get along, you horned thing,

Wild, seditious, rambling!

epode.*

An Iacchic melody

To the golden Aphrodite

Will I lift, as erst did I

Seeking her and her delight

With the Mænads, whose white feet

To the music glance and fleet.

Bacchus, O beloved, where,

Shaking wide thy yellow hair,

Wanderest thou alone, afar?

To the one-eyed Cyclops, we,

Who by right thy servants are,

Minister in misery,

In these wretched goat-skins clad,

Far from thy delights and thee.

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silenus.

Be silent, sons; command the slaves to drive

The gathered flocks into the rock-roofed cave.

chorus.

Go! But what needs this serious haste, O father?

silenus.

I see a Greek ship’s boat upon the coast,

And thence the rowers with some general

Approaching to this cave. About their necks

Hang empty vessels, as they wanted food,

And water-flasks.—O, miserable strangers!

Whence come they, that they know not what and who

My master is, approaching in ill hour

The inhospitable roof of Polypheme,

And the Cyclopian jaw-bone, man-destroying?

Be silent, Satyrs, while I ask and hear

Whence coming, they arrive the Ætnean hill.

ulysses.

Friends, can you show me some clear water spring,

The remedy of our thirst? Will any one

Furnish with food seamen in want of it?

Ha! what is this? We seem to be arrived

At the blithe court of Bacchus. I observe

This sportive band of Satyrs near the caves.

First let me greet the elder.—Hail!

silenus.

Hail thou,

O, Stranger! tell thy country and thy race.

ulysses.

The Ithacan Ulysses and the king:

Of Cephalonia.

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silenus.

Oh! I know the man,

Wordy and shrewd, the son of Sisyphus.

ulysses.

I am the same, but do not rail upon me.—

silenus.

Whence sailing do you come to Sicily?

ulysses.

From Ilion, and from the Trojan toils.

silenus.

How, touched you not at your paternal shore?

ulysses.

The strength of tempests bore me here by force.

silenus.

The self-same accident occurred to me.

ulysses.

Were you then driven here by stress of weather?

silenus.

Following the Pirates who had kidnapped Bacchus.

ulysses.

What land is this, and who inhabit it?—

silenus.

Ætna, the loftiest peak in Sicily.

ulysses.

And are there walls, and tower-surrounded towns?

silenus.

There are not;—These lone rocks are bare of men.

ulysses.

And who possess the land? the race of beasts?

silenus.

Cyclops, who live in caverns, not in houses.

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ulysses.

Obeying whom? Or is the state popular?

silenus.

Shepherds: no one obeys any in aught.

ulysses.

How live they? do they sow the corn of Ceres?

silenus.

On milk and cheese, and on the flesh of sheep.

ulysses.

Have they the Bromian drink from the vine’s stream?

silenus.

Ah! no; they live in an ungracious land.

ulysses.

And are they just to strangers?—hospitable?

silenus.

They think the sweetest thing a stranger brings

Is his own flesh.

ulysses.

What! do they eat man’s flesh?

silenus.

No one comes here who is not eaten up.

ulysses.

The Cyclops now—Where is he? Not at home?

silenus.

Absent on Ætna, hunting with his dogs.

ulysses.

Know’st thou what thou must do to aid us hence?

silenus.

I know not: we will help you all we can.

ulysses.

Provide us food, of which we are in want.

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silenus.

Here is not anything, as I said, but meat.

ulysses.

But meat is a sweet remedy for hunger.

silenus.

Cow’s milk there is, and store of curdled cheese.

ulysses.

Bring out:—I would see all before I bargain.

silenus.

But how much gold will you engage to give?

ulysses.

I bring no gold, but Bacchic juice.

silenus.

O, joy!

’Tis long since these dry lips were wet with wine.

ulysses.

Maron, the son of the God, gave it me.

silenus.

Whom I have nursed a baby in my arms.

ulysses.

The son of Bacchus, for your clearer knowledge.

silenus.

Have you it now?—or is it in the ship?

ulysses.

Old man, this skin contains it, which you see.

silenus.

Why this would hardly be a mouthful for me.

ulysses.

Nay, twice as much as you can draw from thence.

silenus.

You speak of a fair fountain, sweet to me.

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ulysses.

Would you first taste of the unmingled wine?

silenus.

’Tis just—tasting invites the purchaser.

ulysses.

Here is the cup, together with the skin.

silenus.

Pour: that the draught may fillip my remembrance.

ulysses.

See!

silenus.

Papaiapæx! what a sweet smell it has!

ulysses.

You see it then?—

silenus.

By Jove, no! but I smell it.

ulysses.

Taste, that you may not praise it in words only.

silenus.

Babai! Great Bacchus calls me forth to dance!

Joy! joy!

ulysses.

Did it flow sweetly down your throat?

silenus.

So that it tingled to my very nails.

ulysses.

And in addition I will give you gold.

silenus.

Let gold alone! only unlock the cask.

ulysses.

Bring out some cheeses now, or a young goat.

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silenus.

That will I do, despising any master.

Yes, let me drink one cup, and I will give

All that the Cyclops feed upon their mountains.

* * * * *

chorus.

Ye have taken Troy and laid your hands on Helen?

ulysses.

And utterly destroyed the race of Priam.

silenus.

* * * * *

The wanton wretch! she was bewitched to see

The many-coloured anklets and the chain

Of woven gold which girt the neck of Paris,

And so she left that good man Menclaus.

There should be no more women in the world

But such as are reserved for me alone.—

See, here are sheep, and here are goats, Ulysses,

Here are unsparing cheeses of pressed milk;

Take them; depart with what good speed ye may;

First leaving my reward, the Bacchic dew

Of joy-inspiring grapes.

ulysses.

Ah me! Alas!

What shall we do? the Cyclops is at hand!

Old man, we perish! whither can we fly?

silenus.

Hide yourselves quick within that hollow rock.

ulysses.

’Twere perilous to fly into the net.

silenus.

The cavern has recesses numberless;

Hide yourselves quick.

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ulysses.

That will I never do!

The mighty Troy would be indeed disgraced

If I should fly one man. How many times

Have I withstood, with shield immoveable,

Ten thousand Phrygians!—if I needs must die,

Yet will I die with glory;—if I live,

The praise which I have gained will yet remain.

silenus.

What, ho! assistance, comrades, haste assistance!

The Cyclops, Silenus, Ulysses; Chorus.

cyclops.

What is this tumult? Bacchus is not here,

Nor tympanies nor brazen castanets.

How are my young lambs in the cavern? Milking

Their dams or playing by their sides? And is

The new cheese pressed into the bull-rush baskets?

Speak! I’ll beat some of you till you rain tears—

Look up, not downwards when I speak to you.

silenus.

See! I now gape at Jupiter himself,

I stare upon Orion and the stars.

cyclops.

Well, is the dinner fitly cooked and laid?

silenus.

All ready, if your throat is ready too.

cyclops.

Are the bowls full of milk besides?

silenus.

O’er brimming;

So you may drink a tunful if you will.

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cyclops.

Is it ewe’s milk or cow’s milk, or both mixed?—

silenus.

Both, either; only pray don’t swallow me.

cyclops.

By no means.—

* * *

What is this crowd I see beside the stalls?

Outlaws or thieves? for near my cavern-home,

I see my young lambs coupled two by two

With willow bands; mixed with my cheeses lie

Their implements; and this old fellow here

Has his bald head broken with stripes.

silenus.

Ah me!

I have been beaten till I burn with fever.

cyclops.

By whom? Who laid his first upon your head?

silenus.

Those men, because I would not suffer them

To steal your goods.

cyclops.

Did not the rascals know

I am a God, sprung from the race of heaven?

silenus.

I told them so, but they bore off your things,

And ate the cheese in spite of all I said,

And carried out the lambs—and said, moreover,

They’d pin you down with a three cubit collar,

And pull your vitals out through your one eye,

Torture your back with stripes, then binding you,

Throw you as ballast into the ship’s hold,

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And then deliver you, a slave, to move

Enormous rocks, or found a vestibule.

cyclops.

In truth? Nay, haste, and place in order quickly

The cooking knives, and heap upon the hearth,

And kindle it, a great faggot of wood—

As soon as they are slaughtered, they shall fill

My belly, broiling warm from the live coals,

Or boiled and seethed within the bubbling cauldron.

I am quite sick of the wild mountain game,

Of stags and lions I have gorged enough,

And I grow hungry for the flesh of men.

silenus.

Nay, master, something new is very pleasant

After one thing for ever, and of late

Very few strangers have approached our cave.

ulysses.

Hear, Cyclops, a plain tale on the other side.

We, wanting to buy food, came from our ship

Into the neighbourhood of your cave, and here

This old Silenus gave us in exchange

These lambs for wine, the which he took and drank,

And all by mutual compact, without force.

There is no word of truth in what he says,

For slily he was selling all your store.

silenus.

I? May you perish, wretch—

ulysses.

If I speak false!

silenus.

Cyclops, I swear by Neptune who begot thee,

By mighty Triton and by Nereus old,

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Calypso and the glaucous ocean Nymphs,

The sacred waves and all the race of fishes—

Be these the witnesses, my dear sweet master,

My darling little Cyclops, that I never

Gave any of your stores to these false strangers:—

If I speak false may those whom most I love,

My children, perish wretchedly!

chorus.

There stop!

I saw him giving these things to the strangers,

If I speak false, then may my father perish,

But do not thou wrong hospitality.

cyclops.

You lie! I swear that he is juster far

Than Rhadamanthus—I trust more in him.

But let me ask, whence have ye sailed, O strangers?

Who are you? And what city nourished ye?

ulysses.

Our race is Ithacan—having destroyed

The town of Troy, the tempests of the sea

Have driven us on thy land, O Polypheme.

cyclops.

What, have ye shared in the unenvied spoil

Of the false Helen, near Scamander’s stream?

ulysses.

The same, having endured a woful toil.

cyclops.

O, basest expedition! sailed ye not

From Greece to Phrygia for one woman’s sake?

ulysses.

’Twas the God’s work—no mortal was in fault.

But, O great offspring of the ocean-king,

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We pray thee and admonish thee with freedom,

That thou dost spare thy friends who visit thee,

And place no impious food within thy jaws.

For in the depths of Greece we have upreared

Temples to thy great father, which are all

His homes. The sacred bay of Tœnarus

Remains inviolate, and each dim recess

Scooped high on the Malean promontory,

And aery Sunium’s silver-veined crag,

Which divine Pallas keeps unprofaned ever,

The Gerastian asylums, and whate’er

Within wide Greece our enterprise has kept

From Phrygian contumely; and in which

You have a common care, for you inhabit

The skirts of Grecian land, under the roots

Of Ætna and its crags, spotted with fire.

Turn then to converse under human laws,

Receive us shipwrecked suppliants, and provide

Food, clothes, and fire, and hospitable gifts;

Nor fixing upon oxen-piercing spits

Our limbs, so fill your belly and your jaws.

Priam’s wide land has widowed Greece enough;

And weapon-winged murder heaped together

Enough of dead, and wives are husbandless,

And ancient women and grey fathers wail

Their childless age;—if you should roast the rest,

And ’tis a bitter feast that you prepare,

Where then would any turn? Yet be persuaded;

Forego the lust of your jaw-bone; prefer

Pious humanity to wicked will:

Many have bought too dear their evil joys.

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silenus.

Let me advise you, do not spare a morsel

Of all his flesh. If you should eat his tongue

You would become most eloquent, O Cyclops?

cyclops.

Wealth, my good fellow, is the wise man’s God,

All other things are a pretence and boast.

What are my father’s ocean promontories,

The sacred rocks whereon he dwells, to me?

Stranger, I laugh to scorn Jove’s thunderbolt,

I know not that his strength is more than mine.

As to the rest I care not:—When he pours

Rain from above, I have a close pavilion

Under this rock, in which I lie supine,

Feasting on a roast calf or some wild beast,

And drinking pans of milk, and gloriously

Emulating the thunder of high heaven.

And when the Thracian wind pours down the snow,

I wrap my body in the skins of beasts,

Kindle a fire, and bid the snow whirl on.

The earth, by force, whether it will or no,

Bringing forth grass, fattens my flocks and herds,

Which, to what other God but to myself

And this great belly, first of deities,

Should I be bound to sacrifice? I well know

The wise man’s only Jupiter is this,

To eat and drink during his little day,

And give himself no care. And as for those

Who complicate with laws the life of man,

I freely give them tears for their reward.

I will not cheat my soul of its delight,

Or hesitate in dining upon you:—

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And that I may be quit of all demands,

These are my hospitable gifts;—fierce fire

And you ancestral cauldron, which o’er bubbling

Shall finely cook your miserable flesh.

Creep in!—

* * * *

ulysses.

Ay! ay! I have escaped the Trojan toils,

I have escaped the sea, and now I fall

Under the cruel grasp of one impious man.

O Pallas, mistress, Goddess, sprung from Jove,

Now, now, assist me! Mightier toils than Troy

Are these;—I totter on the chasms of peril;—

And thou who inhabitest the thrones

Of the bright stars, look, hospitable Jove,

Upon this outrage of thy deity,

Otherwise be considered as no God!

chorus (alone).

For your gaping gulph, and your gullet wide

The ravine is ready on every side,

The limbs of the strangers are cooked and done,

There is boiled meat, and roast meat, and meat from the coal,

You may chop it, and tear it, and gnash it for fun,

An hairy goat’s-skin contains the whole.

Let me but escape, and ferry me o’er

The stream of your wrath to a safer shore.

The Cyclops Ætnean is cruel and bold,

He murders the strangers

That sit on his hearth,

And dreads no avengers

To rise from the earth.

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He roasts the men before they are cold,

He snatches them broiling from the coal,

And from the cauldron pulls them whole,

And minces their flesh and gnaws their bone

With his cursed teeth, till all begone.

Farewell, foul pavilion!

Farewell, rites of dread!

The Cyclops vermilion,

With slaughter uncloying,

Now feasts on the dead,

In the flesh of strangers joying!

ulysses.

O Jupiter! I saw within the cave

Horrible things; deeds to be feigned in words,

But not believed as being done.

chorus.

What sawest thou the impious Polypheme

Feasting upon your loved companions now?

ulysses.

Selecting two, the plumpest of the crowd,

He grasped them in his hands.—

chorus.

Unhappy man

* * * *

ulysses.

Soon as we came into this craggy place,

Kindling a fire, he cast on the broad hearth

The knotty limbs of an enormous oak,

Three waggon loads at least, and then he strewed

Upon the ground, beside the red fire light,

His couch of pine leaves; and he milked the cows,

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And pouring forth the white milk, filled a bowl

Three cubits wide and four in depth, as much

As would contain four amphoræ, and bound it

With ivy wreaths; then placed upon the fire

A brazen pot to boil, and made red hot

The points of spits, not sharpened with the sickle,

But with a fruit tree bough, and with the jaws

Of axes for Ætnean slaughterings.*

And when this God-abandoned cook of hell

Had made all ready, he seized two of us

And killed them in a kind of measured manner;

For he flung one against the brazen rivets

Of the huge cauldron, and seized the other

By the foot’s tendon, and knocked out his brains

Upon the sharp edge of the craggy stone:

Then peeled his flesh with a great cooking knife

And put him down to roast. The other’s limbs

He chopped into the cauldron to be boiled.

And I, with the tears raining from my eyes,

Stood near the Cyclops, ministering to him;

The rest, in the recesses of the cave,

Clung to the rock like bats, bloodless with fear.

When he was filled with my companions flesh,

He threw himself upon the ground and sent

A loathsome exhalation from his maw.

Then a divine thought came to me. I filled

The cup of Maron, and I offered him

To taste, and said:—“Child of the Ocean God,

Behold what drink the vines of Greece produce,

The exultation and the joy of Bacchus.”

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He, satiated with his unnatural food,

Received it, and at one draught drank it off,

And taking my hand, praised me:—“Thou hast given

A sweet draught after a sweet meal, dear guest.”

And I perceiving that it pleased him, filled

Another cup, well knowing that the wine

Would wound him soon and take a sure revenge.

And the charm fascinated him, and I

Plied him cup after cup, until the drink

Had warmed his entrails, and he sang aloud

In concert with my wailing fellow-seamen

A hideous discord—and the cavern rung.

I have stolen out, so that if you will

You may achieve my safety and your own.

But say, do you desire, or not, to fly

This uncompanionable man, and dwell

As was your wont among the Grecian Nymphs

Within the fanes of your beloved God?

Your father there within agrees to it,

But he is weak and overcome with wine,

And caught as if with bird-lime by the cup,

He claps his wings and crows in doting joy.

You who are young escape with me, and find

Bacchus your ancient friend; unsuited he

To this rude Cyclops.

chorus.

Oh my dearest friend,

That I could see that day, and leave for ever

The impious Cyclops.

* * * *

ulysses.

Listen then what a punishment I have

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For this fell monster, how secure a flight

From your hard servitude.

chorus.

Oh sweeter far

Than is the music of an Asian lyre

Would be the news of Polypheme destroyed.

ulysses.

Delighted with the Bacchic drink he goes

To call his brother Cyclops—who inhabit

A village upon Ætna not far off.

chorus.

I understand, catching him when alone

You think by some measure to dispatch him,

Or thrust him from the precipice.

ulysses.

O no;

Nothing of that kind; my device is subtle.

chorus.

How then? I heard of old that thou wert wise.

ulysses.

I will dissuade him from this plan, by saying

It were unwise to give the Cyclopses

This precious drink, which if enjoyed alone

Would make life sweeter for a longer time.

When vanquished by the Bacchic power, he sleeps,

There is a trunk of olive wood within,

Whose point having made sharp with this good sword

I will conceal in fire, and when I see

It is alight, will fix it, burning yet,

Within the socket of the Cyclops’ eye

And melt it out with fire—as when a man

Turns by its handle a great auger round,

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Fitting the frame work of a ship with beams,

So will I, in the Cyclops’ fiery eye

Turn round the brand and dry the pupil up.

chorus.

Joy! I am mad with joy at your device.

ulysses.

And then with you, my friends, and the old man,

We’ll load the hollow depth of our black ship,

And row with double strokes from this dread shore.

chorus.

May I, as in libations to a God,

Share in the blinding him with the red brand?

I would have some communion in his death.

ulysses.

Doubtless: the brand is a great brand to hold.

chorus.

Oh! I would lift an hundred waggon loads,

If like a wasp’s nest I could scoop the eye out

Of the detested Cyclops.

ulysses.

Silence now!

Ye know the close device—and when I call,

Look ye obey the masters of the craft.

I will not save myself and leave behind

My comrades in the cave: I might escape

Having got clear from that obscure recess,

But ’twere unjust to leave in jeopardy

The dear companions who sailed here with me.

chorus.

Come! who is first, that with his hand

Will urge down the burning brand

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Through the lids, and quench and pierce

The Cyclops’ eye so fiery fierce?

semi-chorus i.

Song within.

Listen! listen! he is coming,

A most hideous discord humming,

Drunken, museless, awkward, yelling,

Far along his rocky dwelling;

Let us with some comic spell

Teach the yet unteachable.

By all means he must be blinded,

If my council be but minded.

semi-chorus ii.

Happy those made odorous

With the dew which sweet grapes weep,

To the village hastening thus,

Seek the vines that soothe to sleep,

Having first embraced thy friend,

There in luxury without end,

With the strings of yellow hair,

Of thy voluptuous leman fair,

Shalt sit playing on a bed!—

Speak what door is opened?

cyclops.

Ha! ha! ha! I’m full of wine,

Heavy with the joy divine,

With the young feast oversated,

Like a merchant’s vessel freighted

To the waters edge, my crop

Is laden to the gullet’s top.

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The fresh meadow grass of spring

Tempts me forth thus wandering

To my brothers on the mountains,

Who shall share the wine’s sweet fountains.

Bring the cask, O stranger, bring!

chorus.

One with eyes the fairest

Cometh from his dwelling;

Some one loves thee, rarest,

Bright beyond my telling.

In thy grace thou shinest

Like some nymph divinest,

In her caverns dewy:—

All delights pursue thee,

Soon pied flowers, sweet-breathing,

Shall thy head be wreathing.

ulysses.

Listen, O Cyclops, for I am well skilled

In Bacchus, whom I gave thee of to drink.

cyclops.

What sort of God is Bacchus then accounted?

ulysses.

The greatest among men for joy of life.

cyclops.

I gulpt him down with very great delight.

ulysses.

This is a God who never injures men.

cyclops.

How does the God like living in a skin?

ulysses.

He is content wherever he is put.

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cyclops.

Gods should not have their body in a skin.

ulysses.

If he gives joy, what is his skin to you?

cyclops.

I hate the skin, but love the wine within.

ulysses.

Stay here, now drink, and make your spirit glad.

cyclops.

Should I not share this liquor with my brothers?

ulysses.

Keep it yourself, and be more honoured so.

cyclops.

I were more useful, giving to my friends.

ulysses.

But village mirth breeds contests, broils, and blows.

cyclops.

When I am drunk none shall lay hands on me.—

ulysses.

A drunken man is better within doors.

cyclops.

He is a fool, who drinking, loves not mirth.

ulysses.

But he is wise, who drunk, remains at home.

cyclops.

Whall shall I do, Silenus? Shall I stay?

silenus.

Stay—for what need have you of pot companions?

cyclops.

Indeed this place is closely carpeted

With flowers and grass.

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silenus.

And in the sun-warm noon

’Tis sweet to drink. Lie down beside me now,

Placing your mighty sides upon the ground.

cyclops.

What do you put the cup behind me for?

silenus.

That no one here may touch it.

cyclops.

Thievish one!

You want to drink;—here place it in the midst.

And thou, O stranger, tell how art thou called?

ulysses.

My name is Nobody. What favour now

Shall I receive to praise you at your hands?

cyclops.

I’ll feast on you the last of your companions.

ulysses.

You grant your guest a fair reward, O Cyclops.

cyclops.

Ha! what is this? Stealing the wine, you rogue!

silenus.

It was this stranger kissing me because

I looked so beautiful.

cyclops.

You shall repent

For kissing the coy wine that loves you not.

silenus.

By Jupiter! you said that I am fair.

cyclops.

Pour out, and only give me the cup full.

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silenus.

How is it mixed? let me observe.

cyclops.

Curse you!

Give it me so.

silenus.

Not till I see you wear

That coronal, and taste the cup to you.

cyclops.

Thou wily traitor!

silenus.

But the wine is sweet.

Aye, you will roar if you are caught in drinking.

cyclops.

See now, my lip is clean and all my beard.

silenus.

Now put your elbow right and drink again.

As you see me drink— * * * *

cyclops.

How now?

silenus.

Ye Gods, what a delicious gulp!

cyclops.

Guest, take it;—you pour out the wine for me.

ulysses.

The wine is well accustomed to my hand.

cyclops.

Pour out the wine!

ulysses.

I pour; only be silent.

cyclops.

Silence is a hard task to him who drinks.

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ulysses.

Take it and drink it off; leave not a dreg.

O, that the drinker died with his own draught!

cyclops.

Papai! the wine must be a sapient plant.

ulysses.

If you drink much after a mighty feast,

Moistening your thirsty maw, you will sleep well;

If you leave aught, Bacchus will dry you up.

cyclops.

Ho! ho! I can scarce rise. What pure delight!

The heavens and earth appear to whirl about

Confusedly. I see the throne of Jove

And the clear congregation of the Gods.

Now if the Graces tempted me to kiss

I would not, for the loveliest of them all

I would not leave this Ganymede.

silenus.

Polypheme,

I am the Ganymede of Jupiter.

cyclops.

By Jove you are; I bore you off from Dardanus.

Ulysses and the Chorus.

ulysses.

Come boys of Bacchus, children of high race,

This man within is folded up in sleep,

And soon will vomit flesh from his fell maw;

The brand under the shed thrusts out its smoke,

No preparation needs, but to burn out

The monster’s eye;—but bear yourselves like men.

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chorus.

We will have courage like the adamant rock,

All things are ready for you here; go in,

Before our father shall perceive the noise.

ulysses.

Vulcan, Ætnean king! burn out with fire

The shining eye of this thy neighbouring monster!

And thou, O Sleep, nursling of gloomy night,

Descend unmixed on this God-hated beast,

And suffer not Ulysses and his comrades,

Returning from their famous Trojan toils,

To perish by this man, who cares not either

For God or mortal; or I needs must think

That Chance is a supreme divinity,

And things divine are subject to her power.

chorus.

Soon a crab the throat will seize

Of him who feeds upon his guest,

Fire will burn his lamp-like eyes

In revenge of such a feast!

A great oak stump now is lying

In the ashes yet undying.

Come, Maron, come!

Raging let him fix the doom,

Let him tear the eyelid up,

Of the Cyclops—that his cup

May be evil!

O, I long to dance and revel

With sweet Bromian, long desired,

In loved ivy-wreathes attired;

Leaving this abandoned home—

Will the moment ever come?

Edition: current; Page: [357]

ulysses.

Be silent, ye wild things! Nay, hold your peace,

And keep your lips quite close; dare not to breathe,

Or spit, or e’en wink, lest ye wake the monster,

Until his eye be tortured out with fire.

chorus.

Nay, we are silent, and we chaw the air.

ulysses.

Come now, and lend a hand to the great stake

Within—it is delightfully red hot.

chorus.

You then command who first should seize the stake

To burn the Cyclops’ eye, that all may share

In the great enterprise.

semi-chorus i.

We are too few,

We cannot at this distance from the door

Thrust fire into his eye.

semi-chorus ii.

And we just now

Have become lame; cannot move hand or foot.

chorus.

The same thing has occurred to us,—our ancles

Are sprained with standing here, I know not how.

ulysses.

What, sprained with standing still?

chorus.

And there is dust

Or ashes in our eyes, I know not whence.

ulysses.

Cowardly dogs! ye will not aid me then?

chorus.

With pitying my own back and my back bone,

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And with not wishing all my teeth knocked out,

This cowardice comes of itself—but stay,

I know a famous Orphic incantation

To make the brand stick of its own accord

Into the skull of this one-eyed son of Earth.

ulysses.

Of old I knew ye thus by nature; now

I know ye better.—I will use the aid

Of my own comrades—yet though weak of hand

Speak cheerfully, that so ye may awaken

The courage of my friends with your blithe words.

chorus.

This I will do with peril of my life,

And blind you with my exhortations, Cyclops.

Hasten and thrust,

And parch up to dust,

The eye of the beast,

Who feeds on his guest.

Burn and blind

The Ætnean hind!

Scoop and draw,

But beware lest he claw

Your limbs near his maw.

cyclops.

Ah me! my eye-sight is parched up to cinders.

chorus.

What a sweet pæan! sing me that again!

cyclops.

Ah me! indeed, what woe has fallen upon me!

But wretched nothings, think ye not to flee

Out of this rock; I, standing at the outlet,

Will bar the way and catch you as you pass.

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chorus.

What are you roaring out, Cyclops?

cyclops.

I perish!

chorus.

For you are wicked.

cyclops.

And besides miserable.

chorus.

What, did you fall into the fire when drunk?

cyclops.

’Twas Nobody destroyed me.

chorus.

Why then no one

Can be to blame.

cyclops.

I say ’twas Nobody

Who blinded me.

chorus.

Why then you are not blind.

cyclops.

I wish you were as blind as I am.

chorus.

Nay,

It cannot be that no one made you blind.

cyclops.

You jeer me; where, I ask, is Nobody?

chorus.

No where, O Cyclops * * *

cyclops.

It was that stranger ruined me:—the wretch

First gave me wine and then burnt out my eyes,

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For wine is strong and hard to struggle with.

Have they escaped, or are they yet within?

chorus.

They stand under the darkness of the rock

And cling to it.

cyclops.

At my right hand or left?

chorus.

Close on your right.

cyclops.

Where?

chorus.

Near the rock itself.

You have them.

cyclops.

Oh, misfortune on misfortune!

I’ve cracked my skull.

chorus.

Now they escape you there.

cyclops.

Not there, although you say so.

chorus.

Not on that side.

cyclops.

Where then?

chorus.

They creep about you on your left.

cyclops.

Ah! I am mocked! They jeer me in my ills.

chorus.

Not there! he is a little there beyond you.

cyclops.

Detested wretch! where are you?

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ulysses.

Far from you

I keep with care this body of Ulysses.

cyclops.

What do you say? You proffer a new name.

ulysses.

My father named me so; and I have taken

A full revenge for your unnatural feast;

I should have done ill to have burned down Troy

And not revenged the murder of my comrades.

cyclops.

Ai! ai! the ancient oracle is accomplished;

It said that I should have my eyesight blinded

By you coming from Troy, yet it foretold

That you should pay the penalty for this

By wandering long over the homeless sea.

ulysses.

I bid thee weep—consider what I say,

I go towards the shore to drive my ship

To mine own land, o’er the Sicilian wave.

cyclops.

Not so, if whelming you with this huge stone

I can crush you and all your men together;

I will descend upon the shore, though blind,

Groping my way adown the steep ravine.

chorus.

And we, the shipmates of Ulysses now,

Will serve our Bacchus all our happy lives.

Edition: current; Page: [362]

TRANSLATION FROM MOSCHUS.

Pan loved his neighbour Echo—but that child

Of Earth and Air pined for the Satyr leaping;

The Satyr loved with wasting madness wild

The bright nymph Lyda,—and so three went weeping.

As Pan loved Echo, Echo loved the Satyr;

The Satyr, Lyda—and thus love consumed them.—

And thus to each—which was a woful matter—

To bear what they inflicted, justice doomed them;

For inasmuch as each might hate the lover,

Each loving, so was hated.—Ye that love not

Be warned—in thought turn this example over,

That when ye love, the like return ye prove not.

Edition: current; Page: [363]

SCENES
FROM THE “MAGICO PRODIGIOSO” OF CALDERON.

Cyprian as a Student; Clarin and Moscon as poor Scholars, with books.

cyprian.

In the sweet solitude of this calm place,

This intricate wild wilderness of trees

And flowers and undergrowth of odorous plants,

Leave me; the books you brought out of the house

To me are ever best society.

And whilst with glorious festival and song

Antioch now celebrates the consecration

Of a proud temple to great Jupiter,

And bears his image in loud jubilee

To its new shrine, I would consume what still

Lives of the dying day, in studious thought,

Far from the throng and turmoil. You, my friends,

Go and enjoy the festival; it will

Be worth the labour, and return for me

When the sun seeks its grave among the billows,

Which among dim grey clouds on the horizon

Dance like white plumes upon a hearse;—and here

I shall expect you.

moscon.

I cannot bring my mind,

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Great as my haste to see the festival

Certainly is, to leave you, Sir, without

Just saying some three or four hundred words.

How is it possible that on a day

Of such festivity, you can bring your mind

To come forth to a solitary country

With three or four old books, and turn your back

On all this mirth?

clarin.

My master’s in the right;

There is not any thing more tiresome

Than a procession day, with troops of men,

And dances, and all that.

moscon.

From first to last,

Clarin, you are a temporizing flatterer;

You praise not what you feel but what he does;—

Toadeater!

clarin.

You lie—under a mistake—

For this is the most civil sort of lie

That can be given to a man’s face. I now

Say what I think.

cyprian.

Enough, you foolish fellows.

Puffed up with your own doting ignorance,

You always take the two sides of one question.

Now go, and as I said, return for me

When night falls, veiling in its shadows wide

This glorious fabric of the universe.

moscon.

How happens it, although you can maintain

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The folly of enjoying festivals,

That yet you go there?

clarin.

Nay, the consequence

Is clear:—who ever did what he advises

Others to do?—

moscon.

Would that my feet were wings,

So would I fly to Livia. [Exit.

clarin.

To speak truth,

Livia is she who has surprised my heart;

But he is more than half way there.—Soho!

Livia, I come; good sport, Livia, Soho! [Exit.

cyprian.

Now, since I am alone, let me examine

The question which has long disturbed my mind

With doubt; since first I read in Plinius

The words of mystic import and deep sense

In which he defines God. My intellect

Can find no God with whom these marks and signs

Fitly agree. It is a hidden truth

Which I must fathom. [Reads.

Enter the Devil, as a fine Gentleman.

dæmon.

Search even as thou wilt,

But thou shalt never find what I can hide.

cyprian.

What noise is that among the boughs? Who moves?

What art thou?—

Edition: current; Page: [366]

dæmon.

’Tis a foreign gentleman.

Even from this morning I have lost my way

In this wild place, and my poor horse at last

Quite overcome, has stretched himself upon

The enamelled tapestry of this mossy mountain,

And feeds and rests at the same time. I was

Upon my way to Antioch upon business

Of some importance, but wrapt up in cares

(Who is exempt from this inheritance)

I parted from my company, and lost

My way, and lost my servants and my comrades.

cyprian.

’Tis singular, that even within the sight

Of the high towers of Antioch, you could lose

Your way. Of all the avenues and green paths

Of this wild wood there is not one but leads

As to its centre, to the walls of Antioch;

Take which you will you cannot miss your road.

dæmon.

And such is ignorance! Even in the sight

Of knowledge it can draw no profit from it.

But as it still is early, and as I

Have no acquaintances in Antioch,

Being a stranger there, I will even wait

The few surviving hours of the day,

Until the night shall conquer it. I see

Both by your dress and by the books in which

You find delight and company, that you

Are a great student;—for my part, I feel

Much sympathy with such pursuits.

Edition: current; Page: [367]

cyprian.

Have you

Studied much?—

dæmon.

No,—and yet I know enough

Not to be wholly ignorant.

cyprian.

Pray, Sir,

What science may you know?—

dæmon.

Many.

cyprian.

Alas!

Much pains must we expend on one alone,

And even then attain it not;—but you

Have the presumption to assert that you

Know many without study.

dæmon.

And with truth.

For in the country whence I come, sciences

Require no learning,—they are known.

cyprian.

Oh, would

I were of that bright country! for in this

The more we study, we the more discover

Our ignorance.

dæmon.

It is so true that I

Had so much arrogance as to oppose

The chair of the most high Professorship,

And obtained many votes, and though I lost,

The attempt was still more glorious, than the failure

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Could be dishonourable: if you believe not,

Let us refer it to dispute respecting

That which you know best, and although I

Know not the opinion you maintain, and though

It be the true one, I will take the contrary.

cyprian.

The offer gives me pleasure. I am now

Debating with myself upon a passage

Of Plinius, and my mind is racked with doubt

To understand and know who is the God

Of whom he speaks.

dæmon.

It is a passage, if

I recollect it right, couched in these words:

“God is one supreme goodness, one pure essence,

One substance, and one sense, all sight, all hands.”

cyprian.

’Tis true.

dæmon.

What difficulty find you here?

cyprian.

I do not recognise among the Gods

The God defined by Plinius; if he must

Be supreme goodness, even Jupiter

Is not supremely good; because we see

His deeds are evil, and his attributes

Tainted with mortal weakness; in what manner

Can supreme goodness be consistent with

The passions of humanity?

dæmon.

The wisdom

Of the old world masked with the names of Gods,

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The attributes of Nature and of Man;

A sort of popular philosophy.

cyprian.

This reply will not satisfy me, for

Such awe is due to the high name of God

That ill should never be imputed. Then,

Examining the question with more care,

It follows, that the gods should always will

That which is best, were they supremely good.

How then does one will one thing—one another?

And you may not say that I allege

Poetical or philosophic learning:—

Consider the ambiguous responses

Of their oracular statues; from two shrines

Two armies shall obtain the assurance of

One victory. Is it not indisputable

That two contending wills can never lead

To the same end? And being opposite,

If one be good is not the other evil?

Evil in God is inconceivable;

But supreme goodness fails among the gods

Without their union.

dæmon.

I deny your major.

These responses are means towards some end

Unfathomed by our intellectual beam.

They are the work of providence, and more

The battle’s loss may profit those who lose,

Than victory advantage those who win.

cyprian.

That I admit, and yet that God should not

(Falsehood is incompatible with deity)

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Assure the victory; it would be enough

To have permitted the defeat; if God

Be all sight,—God, who beheld the truth,

Would not have given assurance of an end

Never to be accomplished; thus, although

The Deity may according to his attributes

Be well distinguished into persons, yet,

Even in the minutest circumstance,

His essence must be one.

dæmon.

To attain the end

The affections of the actors in the scene

Must have been thus influenced by his voice.

cyprian.

But for a purpose thus subordinate

He might have employed genii, good or evil,—

A sort of spirits called so by the learned,

Who roam about inspiring good or evil,

And from whose influence and existence we

May well infer our immortality:—

Thus God might easily, without descending

To a gross falsehood in his proper person,

Have moved the affections by this mediation

To the just point.

dæmon.

These trifling contradictions

Do not suffice to impugn the unity

Of the high gods; in things of great importance

They still appear unanimous; consider

That glorious fabric—man,—his workmanship,

Is stamped with one conception.

Edition: current; Page: [371]

cyprian.

Who made man

Must have, methinks, the advantage of the others.

If they are equal, might they not have risen

In opposition to the work, and being

All hands, according to our author here,

Have still destroyed even as the other made?

If equal in their power, and only unequal

In opportunity, which of the two

Will remain conqueror?

dæmon.

On impossible

And false hypothesis there can be built

No argument. Say, what do you infer

From this?

cyprian.

That there must be a mighty God

Of supreme goodness and of highest grace,

All sight, all hands, all truth, infallible,

Without an equal and without a rival;

The cause of all things and the effect of nothing,

One power, one will, one substance, and one essence.

And in whatever persons, one or two,

His attributes may be distinguished, one

Sovereign power, one solitary essence,

One cause of all cause. [They rise.

dæmon.

How can I impugn

So clear a consequence?

cyprian.

Do you regret

My victory?

Edition: current; Page: [372]

dæmon.

Who but regrets a check

In rivalry of wit? I could reply

And urge new difficulties, but will now

Depart, for I hear steps of men approaching,

And it is time that I should now pursue

My journey to the city.

cyprian.

Go in peace!

Demon.

Remain in peace! Since thus it profits him

To study, I will wrap his senses up

In sweet oblivion of all thought, but of

A piece of excellent beauty; and as I

Have power given me to wage enmity

Against Justina’s soul, I will extract

From one effect two vengeances. [Exit.

cyprian.

I never

Met a more learned person. Let me now

Revolve this doubt again with careful mind. [He reads.

Enter Lelio and Floro.

lelio.

Here stop. These toppling rocks and tangled boughs,

Impenetrable by the noonday beam,

Shall be sole witnesses of what we —

floro.

Draw!

If there were words, here is the place for deeds.

Edition: current; Page: [373]

lelio.

Thou needest not instruct me; well I know

That in the field the silent tongue of steel

Speaks thus. [They fight.

cyprian.

Ha! what is this? Lelio, Floro,

Be it enough that Cyprian stands between you,

Although unarmed.

lelio.

Whence comest thou, to stand

Between me and my vengeance?

floro.

From what rocks

And desart cells?

Enter Moscon and Clarin.

moscon.

Run, run! for where we left my master

We hear the clash of swords.

clarin.

I never

Run to approach things of this sort, but only

To avoid them. Sir! Cyprian! sir!

cyprian.

Be silent, fellows! What! two friends who are

In blood and fame the eyes and hope of Antioch;

One of the noble men of the Colatti,

The other son of the Governor, adventure

And cast away, on some slight cause no doubt,

Two lives the honour of their country?

Edition: current; Page: [374]

lelio.

Cyprian!

Although my high respect towards your person

Holds now my sword suspended, thou canst not

Restore it to the slumber of its scabbard.

Thou knowest more of science than the duel;

For when two men of honour take the field,

No [] or respect can make them friends,

But one must die in the pursuit.

floro.

I pray

That you depart hence with your people, and

Leave us to finish what we have begun

Without advantage.

cyprian.

Though you may imagine

That I know little of the laws of duel,

Which vanity and valour instituted,

You are in error. By my birth I am

Held no less than yourselves to know the limits

Of honour and of infamy, nor has study

Quenched the free spirit which first ordered them;

And thus to me, as one well experienced

In the false quicksands of the sea of honour,

You may refer the merits of the case;

And if I should perceive in your relation

That either has the right to satisfaction

From the other, I give you my word of honour

To leave you.

lelio.

Under this condition then

I will relate the cause, and you will cede

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And must confess th’ impossibility

Of compromise; for the same lady is

Beloved by Floro and myself.

floro.

It seems

Much to me that the light of day should look

Upon that idol of my heart—but he—

Leave us to fight, according to thy word.

cyprian.

Permit one question further: is the lady

Impossible to hope or not?

lelio.

She is

So excellent, that if the light of day

Should excite Floro’s jealousy, it were

Without just cause, for even the light of day

Trembles to gaze on her.

cyprian.

Would you for your

Part marry her?

floro.

Such is my confidence.

cyprian.

And you?

lelio.

O, would that I could lift my hope

So high? for though she is extremely poor,

Her virtue is her dowry.

cyprian.

And if you both

Would marry her, is it not weak and vain,

Culpable and unworthy, thus beforehand

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To slur her honour. What would the world say

If one should slay the other, and if she

Should afterwards espouse the murderer?

[The rivals agree to refer their quarrel to Cyprian; who in consequence visits Justina, and becomes enamoured of her: she disdains him, and he retires to a solitary sea-shore.

SCENE II.

cyprian.

Oh, memory! permit it not

That the tyrant of my thought

Be another soul that still

Holds dominion o’er the will,

That would refuse, but can no more,

To bend, to tremble, and adore.

Vain idolatry!—I saw,

And gazing, became blind with error;

Weak ambition, which the awe

Of her presence bound to terror!

So beautiful she was—and I,

Between my love and jealousy,

Am so convulsed with hope and fear,

Unworthy as it may appear;—

So bitter is the life I live,

That, hear me, Hell! I now would give

To thy most detested spirit

My soul, for ever to inherit,

To suffer punishment and pine,

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So this woman may be mine.

Hear’st thou, Hell! dost thou reject it?

My soul is offered!

dæmon (unseen).

I accept it.

[Tempest, with thunder and lightning.

cyprian.

What is this? ye heavens for ever pure,

At once intensely radiant and obscure!

Athwart the etherial halls

The lightning’s arrow and the thunder-balls

The day affright.

As from the horizon round,

Burst with earthquake sound,

In mighty torrents the electric fountains;—

Clouds quench the sun, and thunder smoke

Strangles the air, and fire eclipses heaven.

Philosophy, thou canst not even

Compel their causes underneath thy yoke,

From yonder clouds even to the waves below

The fragments of a single ruin choke

Imagination’s flight;

For, on flakes of surge, like feathers light,

The ashes of the desolation cast

Upon the gloomy blast,

Tell of the footsteps of the storm.

And nearer see the melancholy form

Of a great ship, the outcast of the sea,

Drives miserably!

And it must fly the pity of the port,

Or perish, and its last and sole resort

Is its own raging enemy.

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The terror of the thrilling cry

Was a fatal prophesy

Of coming death, who hovers now

Upon that shattered prow,

That they who die not may be dying still.

And not alone the insane elements

Are populous with wild portents,

But that sad ship is as a miracle

Of sudden ruin, for it drives so fast

It seems as if it had arrayed its form

With the headlong storm.

It strikes—I almost feel the shock,—

It stumbles on a jagged rock,—

Sparkles of blood on the white foam are cast.

A Tempest—All exclaim within,

We are all lost!

dæmon (within).

Now from this plank will I

Pass to the land and thus fulfil my scheme.

cyprian.

As in contempt of the elemental rage

A man comes forth in safety, while the ship’s

Great form is in a watery eclipse

Obliterated from the Ocean’s page,

And round its wreck the huge sea-monsters sit,

A horrid conclave, and the whistling wave

Are heaped over its carcase, like a grave.

The Dæmon enters, as escaped from the sea.

dæmon (aside).

It was essential to my purposes

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To wake a tumult on the sapphire ocean,

That in this unknown form I might at length

Wipe out the blot of the discomfiture

Sustained upon the mountain, and assail

With a new war the soul of Cyprian,

Forging the instruments of his destruction

Even from his love and from his wisdom.—Oh!

Beloved earth, dear mother, in thy bosom

I seek a refuge from the monster who

Precipitates itself upon me.

cyprian.

Friend,

Collect thyself; and be the memory

Of thy late suffering, and thy greatest sorrow

But as a shadow of the past,—for nothing

Beneath the circle of the moon, but flows

And changes, and can never know repose.

dæmon.

And who art thou, before whose feet my fate

Has prostrated me?

cyprian.

One who moved with pity,

Would soothe its stings.

dæmon.

Oh! that can never be!

No solace can my lasting sorrows find.

cyprian.

Wherefore?

dæmon.

Because my happiness is lost.

Yet I lament what has long ceased to be

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The object of desire or memory,

And my life is not life.

cyprian.

Now, since the fury

Of this earthquaking hurricane is still,

And the crystalline heaven has reassumed

Its windless calm so quickly, that it seems

As if its heavy wrath had been awakened

Only to overwhelm that vessel,—speak,

Who art thou, and whence comest thou?

dæmon.

Far more

My coming hither cost, than thou hast seen

Or I can tell. Among my misadventures

This shipwreck is the least. Wilt thou hear?

cyprian.

Speak.

dæmon.

Since thou desirest, I will then unveil

Myself to thee;—for in myself I am

A world of happiness and misery;

This I have lost, and that I must lament

For ever. In my attributes I stood

So high and so heroically great,

In lineage so supreme, and with a genius

Which penetrated with a glance the world

Beneath my feet, that won by my high merit

A king—whom I may call the king of kings,

Because all others tremble in their pride

Before the terrors of his countenance,

In his high palace roofed with brightest gems

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Of living light—call them the stars of Heaven—

Named me his counsellor. But the high praise

Stung me with pride and envy, and I rose

In mighty competition, to ascend

His seat and place my foot triumphantly

Upon his subject thrones. Chastised, I know

The depth to which ambition falls; too mad

Was the attempt, and yet more mad were now

Repentance of the irrevocable deed:—

Therefore I chose this ruin with the glory

Of not to be subdued, before the shame

Of reconciling me with him who reigns

By coward cession.—Nor was I alone,

Nor am I now, nor shall I be alone;

And there was hope, and there may still be hope,

For many suffrages among his vassals

Hailed me their lord and king, and many still

Are mine, and many more, perchance shall be.

Thus vanquished, though in fact victorious,

I left his seat of empire, from mine eye

Shooting forth poisonous lightning, while my words

With inauspicious thunderings shook Heaven,

Proclaiming vengeance, public as my wrong,

And imprecating on his prostrate slaves

Rapine, and death, and outrage. Then I sailed

Over the mighty fabric of the world,

A pirate ambushed in its pathless sands,

A lynx crouched watchfully among its caves

And craggy shores; and I have wandered over

The expanse of these wide wildernesses

In this great ship, whose bulk is now dissolved

In the light breathings of the invisible wind,

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And which the sea has made a dustless ruin,

Seeking ever a mountain, through whose forests

I seek a man, whom I must now compel

To keep his word with me. I came arrayed

In tempest, and although my power could well

Bridle the forest winds in their career,

For other causes I forbore to soothe

Their fury to Favonian gentleness,

I could and would not; (thus I wake in him [Aside.

A love of magic art.) Let not this tempest,

Nor the succeeding calm excite thy wonder;

For by my art the sun would turn as pale

As his weak sister with unwonted fear.

And in my wisdom are the orbs of Heaven

Written as in a record; I have pierced

The flaming circles of their wondrous spheres

And know them as thou knowest every corner

Of this dim spot. Let it not seem to thee

That I boast vainly; wouldst thou that I work

A charm over this waste and savage wood,

This Babylon of crags and aged trees,

Filling its leafy coverts with a horror

Thrilling and strange? I am the friendless guest

Of these wild oaks and pines—and as from thee

I have received the hospitality

Of this rude place, I offer thee the fruit

Of years of toil in recompense; whate’er

Thy wildest dream presented to thy thought

As object of desire, that shall be thine.

* * * *

And thenceforth shall so firm an amity

’Twixt thou and me be, that neither fortune,

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The monstrous phantom which pursues success,

That careful miser, that free prodigal,

Who ever alternates with changeful hand,

Evil and good, reproach and fame; nor Time,

That loadstar of the ages, to whose beam

The winged years speed o’er the intervals

Of their unequal revolutions; nor

Heaven itself, whose beautiful bright stars

Rule and adorn the world, can ever make

The least division between thee and me,

Since now I find a refuge in thy favour.

SCENE III.

The Dæmon tempts Justina, who is a Christian.

dæmon.

Abyss of Hell! I call on thee,

Thou wild misrule of thine own anarchy!

From thy prison-house set free

The spirits of voluptuous death,

That with their mighty breath

They may destroy a world of virgin thoughts;

Let her chaste mind with fancies thick as motes

Be peopled from thy shadowy deep,

Till her guiltless phantasy

Full to overflowing be!

And with sweetest harmony,

Let birds, and flowers, and leaves, and all things move

To love, only to love.

Let nothing meet her eyes

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But signs of Love’s soft victories;

Let nothing meet her ear

But sounds of love’s sweet sorrow,

So that from faith no succour she may borrow,

But, guided by my spirit blind

And in a magic snare entwined,

She may now seek Cyprian.

Begin, while I in silence bind

My voice, when thy sweet song thou hast began.

a voice within.

What is the glory far above

All else in human life?

all.

Love! love!

[While these words are sung, the Dæmon goes out at one door, and Justina enters at another.

the first voice.

There is no form in which the fire

Of love its traces has impressed not.

Man lives far more in love’s desire

Than by life’s breath, soon possessed not.

If all that lives must love or die,

All shapes on earth, or sea, or sky,

With one consent to Heaven cry

That the glory far above

All else in life is—

all.

Love! O love!

justina.

Thou melancholy thought which art

So fluttering and so sweet, to thee

When did I give the liberty

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Thus to afflict my heart?

What is the cause of this new power

Which doth my fevered being move,

Momently raging more and more?

What subtle pain is kindled now

Which from my heart doth overflow

Into my senses?—

all.

Love, O, love!

justina.

’Tis that enamoured nightingale

Who gives me the reply;

He ever tells the same soft tale

Of passion and of constancy

To his mate, who rapt and fond

Listening sits, a bough beyond.

Be silent, Nightingale—no more

Make me think, in hearing thee

Thus tenderly thy love deplore,

If a bird can feel his so,

What a man would feel for me.

And, voluptuous vine, O thou

Who seekest most when least pursuing,—

To the trunk thou interlacest

Art the verdure which embracest,

And the weight which is its ruin,—

No more, with green embraces, vine,

Make me think on what thou lovest,—

For whilst thou thus thy boughs entwine,

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I fear lest thou should’st teach me, sophist,

How arms might be entangled too.

Light-enchanted sunflower, thou

Who gazest ever true and tender

On the sun’s revolving splendour!

Follow not his faithless glance

With thy faded countenance,

Nor teach my beating heart to fear,

If leaves can mourn without a tear,

How eyes must weep! O Nightingale,

Cease from thy enamoured tale,—

Leafy vine, unwreathe thy bower,

Restless sunflower, cease to move,—

Or tell me all, what poisonous power

Ye use against me—

all.

Love! love! love!

justina.

It cannot be!—Whom have I ever loved?

Trophies of my oblivion and disdain,

Floro and Lelio did I not reject?

And Cyprian?—

[She becomes troubled at the name of Cyprian.

Did I not requite him

With such severity, that he has fled

Where none has ever heard of him again?—

Alas! I now begin to fear that this

May be the occasion whence desire grows bold,

As if there were no danger. From the moment

That I pronounced to my own listening heart,

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Cyprian is absent, O me miserable!

I know not what I feel! [More calmly.

It must be pity

To think that such a man, whom all the world

Admired, should be forgot by all the world,

And I the cause. [She again becomes troubled.

And yet if it were pity,

Floro and Lelio might have equal share,

For they are both imprisoned for my sake. [Calmly.

Alas! what reasonings are these? it is

Enough I pity him, and that, in vain,

Without this ceremonious subtlety.

And woe is me! I know not where to find him now,

Even should I seek him through this wide world.

Enter Dæmon.

dæmon.

Follow, and I will lead thee where he is.

justina.

And who art thou, who hast found entrance hither,

Into my chamber through the doors and locks?

Art thou a monstrous shadow which my madness

Has formed in the idle air?

dæmon.

No. I am one

Called by the thought which tyrannizes thee

From his eternal dwelling; who this day

Is pledged to bear thee unto Cyprian.

justina.

So shall thy promise fail. This agony

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Of passion which afflicts my heart and soul

May sweep imagination in its storm,

The will is firm.

dæmon.

Already half is done

In the imagination of an act.

The sin incurred, the pleasure then remains,

Let not the will stop half-way on the road.

justina.

I will not be discouraged, nor despair,

Although I thought it, and although ’tis true,

That thought is but a prelude to the deed:—

Thought is not in my power, but action is:

I will not move my foot to follow thee.

dæmon.

But far a mightier wisdom than thine own

Exerts itself within thee, with such power

Compelling thee to that which it inclines

That it shall force thy step; how wilt thou then

Resist, Justina?

justina.

By my free-will.

dæmon.

I

Must force thy will.

justina.

It is invincible;

It were not free if thou hadst power upon it.

[He draws, but cannot move her.

dæmon.

Come, where a pleasure waits thee.

Edition: current; Page: [389]

justina.

It were bought

Too dear.

dæmon.

’Twill soothe thy heart to softest peace.

justina.

’Tis dread captivity.

dæmon.

’Tis joy, ’tis glory.

justina.

’Tis shame, ’tis torment, ’tis despair.

dæmon.

But how

Canst thou defend thyself from that or me,

If my power drags thee onward?

justina.

My defence

Consists in God.

[He vainly endeavours to force her, and at last releases her.

dæmon.

Woman, thou hast subdued me,

Only by not owning thyself subdued.

But since thou thus findest defence in God,

I will assume a feigned form, and thus

Make thee a victim of my baffled rage.

For I will mask a spirit in thy form

Who will betray thy name to infamy,

And doubly shall I triumph in thy loss,

First by dishonouring thee, and then by turning

False pleasure to true ignominy. [Exit.

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justina.

I

Appeal to Heaven against thee; so that Heaven

May scatter thy delusions, and the blot

Upon my fame vanish in idle thought,

Even as flame dies in the envious air,

And as the flowret wanes at morning frost,

And thou shouldst never—But, alas! to whom

Do I still speak?—Did not a man but now

Stand here before me?—No, I am alone,

And yet I saw him. Is he gone so quickly?

Or can the heated mind engender shapes

From its own fear? Some terrible and strange

Peril is near. Lisander! father! lord!

Livia!—

Enter Lisander and Livia.

lisander.

O, my daughter! What?

livia.

What?

justina.

Saw you

A man go forth from my apartment now?—

I scarce sustain myself!

lisander.

A man here!

justina.

Have you not seen him?

Edition: current; Page: [391]

livia.

No, Lady.

justina.

I saw him.

lisander.

’Tis impossible; the doors

Which led to this apartment were all locked.

livia (aside).

I dare say it was Moscon whom she saw,

For he was locked up in my room.

lisander.

It must

Have been some image of thy phantasy.

Such melancholy as thou feedest, is

Skilful in forming such in the vain air

Out of the motes and atoms of the day.

livia.

My master’s in the right.

justina.

O, would it were

Delusion; but I fear some greater ill.

I feel as if out of my bleeding bosom

My heart were torn in fragments; aye,

Some mortal spell is wrought against my frame;

So potent was the charm, that had not God

Shielded my humble innocence from wrong,

I should have sought my sorrow and my shame

With willing steps.—Livia, quick bring my cloak,

For I must seek refuge from these extremes

Even in the temple of the highest God

Which secretly the faithful worship.

Edition: current; Page: [392]

livia.

Here.

justina (putting on her cloak).

In this, as in a shroud of snow, may I

Quench the consuming fire in which I burn,

Wasting away!

lisander.

And I will go with thee.

livia.

When I once see them safe out of the house

I shall breathe freely.

justina.

So do I confide

In thy just favour, Heaven!

lisander.

Let us go.

justina.

Thine is the cause, great God! turn for my sake,

And for thine own, mercifully to me!

Edition: current; Page: [393]

SCENES
FROM THE FAUST OF GOËTHE.

PROLOGUE IN HEAVEN.

The Lord and the Host of Heaven. Enter three Archangels.

raphael.

The sun makes music as of old

Amid the rival spheres of Heaven,

On its predestined circle rolled

With thunder speed: the Angels even

Draw strength from gazing on its glance,

Though none its meaning fathom may:—

The world’s unwithered countenance

Is bright as at creation’s day.

gabriel.

And swift and swift, with rapid lightness,

The adorned Earth spins silently,

Alternating Elysian brightness

With deep and dreadful night; the sea

Foams in broad billows from the deep

Up to the rocks, and rocks and ocean,

Onward, with spheres which never sleep,

Are hurried in eternal motion.

Edition: current; Page: [394]

michael.

And tempests in contention roar

From land to sea, from sea to land;

And, raging, weave a chain of power,

Which girds the earth, as with a band.—

A flashing desolation there,

Flames before the thunder’s way;

But thy servants, Lord, revere

The gentle changes of thy day.

chorus of the three.

The Angels draw strength from thy glance,

Though no one comprehend thee may;—

Thy world’s unwithered countenance

Is bright as on creation’s day.*

Edition: current; Page: [395]

Enter Mephistopheles.

mephistopheles.

As thou, O Lord, once more art kind enough

To interest thyself in our affairs—

And ask, “How goes it with you there below?”

And as indulgently at other times

Thou tookedst not my visits in ill part,

Thou seest me here once more among thy household.

Though I should scandalize this company,

You will excuse me if I do not talk

In the high style which they think fashionable;

My pathos would certainly make you laugh too,

Had you not long since given over laughing.

Nothing know I to say of suns and worlds;

I observe only how men plague themselves;—

The little god o’ the world keeps the same stamp,

As wonderful as on creation’s day:—

A little better would he live, hadst thou

Not given him a glimpse of heaven’s light

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Which he calls reason, and employs it only

To live more beastlily than any beast.

With reverence to your Lordship be it spoken,

He’s like one of those long-legged grasshoppers,

Who flits and jumps about, and sings for ever

The same old song i’ the grass. There let him lie,

Burying his nose in every heap of dung.

the lord.

Have you no more to say? Do you come here

Always to scold, and cavil, and complain?

Seems nothing ever right to you on earth?

mephistopheles.

No, Lord! I find all there, as ever, bad at best.

Even I am sorry for man’s days of sorrow;

I could myself almost give up the pleasure

Of plaguing the poor things.

the lord.

Knowest thou Faust?

mephistopheles.

The Doctor?

the lord.

Aye; my servant Faust.

mephistopheles.

In truth

He serves you in a fashion quite his own;

And the fool’s meat and drink are not of earth.

His aspirations bear him on so far

That he is half aware of his own folly,

For he demands from Heaven its fairest star,

And from the earth the highest joy it bears,

Yet all things far, and all things near, are vain

To calm the deep emotions of his breast.

Edition: current; Page: [397]

the lord.

Though he now serves me in a cloud of error,

I will soon lead him forth to the clear day.

When trees look green full well the gardener knows

That fruits and blooms will deck the coming year.

mephistopheles.

What will you bet?—now I am sure of winning—

Only, observe you give me full permission

To lead him softly on my path.

the lord.

As long

As he shall live upon the earth, so long

Is nothing unto thee forbidden—Man

Must err till he has ceased to struggle.

mephistopheles.

Thanks.

And that is all I ask; for willingly

I never make acquaintance with the dead.

The full fresh cheeks of youth are food for me,

And if a corpse knocks, I am not at home.

For I am like a cat—I like to play

A little with the mouse before I eat it.

the lord.

Well, well! it is permitted thee. Draw thou

His spirit from its springs; as thou find’st power,

Seize him and lead him on thy downward path;

And stand ashamed when failure teaches thee

That a good man, even in his darkest longings,

Is well aware of the right way.

mephistopheles.

Well and good.

I am not in much doubt about my bet,

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And if I lose, then ’tis your turn to crow;

Enjoy your triumph then with a full breast.

Aye; dust shall he devour, and that with pleasure,

Like my old paramour, the famous Snake.

the lord.

Pray come here when it suits you; for I never

Had much dislike for people of your sort.

And, among all the Spirits who rebelled,

The knave was ever the least tedious to me.

The active spirit of man soon sleeps, and soon

He seeks unbroken quiet; therefore I

Have given him the Devil for a companion,

Who may provoke him to some sort of work,

And must create for ever.—But ye, pure

Children of God, enjoy eternal beauty;—

Let that which ever operates and lives

Clasp you within the limits of its love;

And seize with sweet and melancholy thoughts

The floating phantoms of its loveliness.

[Heaven closes; the Archangels exeunt.

mephistopheles.

From time to time I visit the old fellow,

And I take care to keep on good terms with him.

Civil enough is this same God Almighty,

To talk so freely with the Devil himself.

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SCENES
FROM THE FAUST OF GOËTHE.

MAY-DAY NIGHT.

Scene—The Hartz Mountain, a desolate Country.

Faust, Mephistopheles.

mephistopheles.

Would you not like a broomstick? As for me

I wish I had a good stout ram to ride;

For we are still far from th’ appointed place.

faust.

This knotted staff is help enough for me,

Whilst I feel fresh upon my legs. What good

Is there in making short a pleasant way?

To creep along the labyrinths of the vales,

And climb those rocks, where ever-babbling springs

Precipitate themselves in waterfalls,

Is the true sport that seasons such a path.

Already Spring kindles the birchen spray,

And the hoar pines already feel her breath:

Shall she not work also within our limbs?

mephistopheles.

Nothing of such an influence do I feel.

My body is all wintry, and I wish

The flowers upon our path were frost and snow.

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But see, how melancholy rises now,

Dimly uplifting her belated beam,

The blank unwelcome round of the red moon,

And gives so bad a light, that every step

One stumbles ’gainst some crag. With your permission,

I’ll call an Ignis-fatuus to our aid:

I see one yonder burning jollily.

Halloo, my friend! may I request that you

Would favour us with your bright company?

Why should you blaze away there to no purpose?

Pray be so good as light us up this way.

ignis-fatuus.

With reverence be it spoken, I will try

To overcome the lightness of my nature;

Our course, you know, is generally zig-zag.

mephistopheles.

Ha, ha! your worship thinks you have to deal

With men. Go strait on, in the Devil’s name,

Or I shall puff your flickering life out.

ignis-fatuus.

Well,

I see you are the master of the house;

I will accommodate myself to you.

Only consider, that to-night this mountain

Is all enchanted, and if Jack-a-lantern

Shows you his way, though you should miss your own,

You ought not to be too exact with him.

faust, mephistopheles, and ignis-fatuus, in alternate Chorus.

The limits of the sphere of dream,

Edition: current; Page: [401]

The bounds of true and false, are past.

Lead us on, thou wandering Gleam,

Lead us onward, far and fast,

To the wide, the desart waste.

But see, how swift advance and shift,

Trees behind trees, row by row,—

How, clift by clift, rocks bend and lift

Their frowning foreheads as we go.

The giant-snouted crags, ho! ho!

How they snort, and how they blow!

Through the mossy sods and stones,

Stream and streamlet hurry down

A rushing throng! A sound of song

Beneath the vault of Heaven is blown!

Sweet notes of love, the speaking tones

Of this bright day, sent down to say

That Paradise on Earth is known,

Resound around, beneath, above.

All we hope and all we love

Finds a voice in this blithe strain,

Which wakens hill and wood and rill,

And vibrates far o’er field and vale,

And which Echo, like the tale

Of old times, repeats again.

To whoo! to whoo! near, nearer now

The sound of song, the rushing throng!

Are the screech, the lapwing, and the jay,

All awake as if ’twere day?

Edition: current; Page: [402]

See, with long legs and belly wide,

A salamander in the brake!

Every root is like a snake,

And along the loose hill side,

With strange contortions through the night,

Curls, to seize or to affright;

And, animated, strong, and many,

They dart forth polypus-antennæ,

To blister with their poison spume

The wanderer. Through the dazzling gloom

The many-coloured mice, that thread

The dewy turf beneath our tread,

In troops each other’s motions cross,

Through the heath and through the moss;

And, in legions intertangled,

The fire-flies flit, and swarm, and throng,

Till all the mountain depths are spangled.

Tell me, shall we go or stay?

Shall we onward? Come along!

Everything around is swept

Forward, onward, far away!

Trees and masses intercept

The sight, and wisps on every side

Are puffed up and multiplied.

mephistopheles.

Now vigorously seize my skirt, and gain

This pinnacle of isolated crag.

One may observe with wonder from this point,

How Mammon glows among the mountains.

Edition: current; Page: [403]

faust.

Aye—

And strangely through the solid depth below

A melancholy light, like the red dawn,

Shoots from the lowest gorge of the abyss

Of mountains, lightning hitherward: there rise

Pillars of smoke, here clouds float gently by;

Here the light burns soft as the enkindled air,

Or the illumined dust of golden flowers;

And now it glides like tender colours spreading;

And now bursts forth in fountains from the earth;

And now it winds, one torrent of broad light,

Through the far valley with a hundred veins;

And now once more within that narrow corner

Masses itself into intensest splendour.

And near us, see, sparks spring out of the ground,

Like golden sand scattered upon the darkness;

The pinnacles of that black wall of mountains

That hems us in, are kindled.

mephistopheles.

Rare, in faith!

Does not Sir Mammon gloriously illuminate

His palace for this festival—it is

A pleasure which you had not known before.

I spy the boisterous guests already.

faust.

How

The children of the wind rage in the air!

With what fierce strokes they fall upon my neck!

mephistopheles.

Cling tightly to the old ribs of the crag.

Beware! for if with them thou warrest

Edition: current; Page: [404]

In their fierce flight towards the wilderness,

Their breath will sweep thee into dust, and drag

Thy body to a grave in the abyss.

A cloud thickens the night.

Hark! how the tempest crashes through the forest!

The owls fly out in strange affright;

The columns of the evergreen palaces

Are split and shattered;

The roots creak, and stretch, and groan;

And ruinously overthrown,

The trunks are crushed and shattered

By the fierce blast’s unconquerable stress.

Over each other crack and crash they all

In terrible and intertangled fall;

And through the ruins of the shaken mountain

The airs hiss and howl—

It is not the voice of the fountain,

Nor the wolf in his midnight prowl.

Dost thou not hear?

Strange accents are ringing

Aloft, afar, anear;

The witches are singing!

The torrent of a raging wizard song

Streams the whole mountain along.

chorus of witches.

The stubble is yellow, the corn is green,

Now to the Brocken the witches go;

The mighty multitude here may be seen

Gathering, wizard and witch, below.

Sir Urean is sitting aloft in the air;

Hey over stock! and hey over stone!

’Twixt witches and incubi, what shall be done?

Edition: current; Page: [405]

Tell it who dare! tell it who dare!

a voice.

Upon a sow-swine, whose farrows were nine,

Old Baubo rideth alone.

chorus.

Honour her, to whom honour is due,

Old mother Baubo, honour to you!

An able sow, with old Baubo upon her,

Is worthy of glory, and worthy of honour!

The legion of witches is coming behind,

Darkening the night, and outspeeding the wind—

a voice.

Which way comest thou?

a voice.

Over Ilsenstein;

The owl was awake in the white moon-shine;

I saw her at rest in her downy nest,

And she stared at me with her broad, bright eye.

voices.

And you may now as well, take your course on to Hell,

Since you ride by so fast, on the headlong blast.

a voice.

She dropt poison upon me as I past.

Here are the wounds—

chorus of witches.

Come away! come along!

The way is wide, the way is long,

But what is that for a Bedlam throng?

Stick with the prong, and scratch with the broom,

The child in the cradle lies strangled at home,

And the mother is clapping her hands.—

semi-chorus of wizards i.

We glide in

Edition: current; Page: [406]

Like snails when the women are all away;

And from a house once given over to sin

Woman has a thousand steps to stray.

semi-chorus ii.

A thousand steps must a woman take,

Where a man but a single spring will make.

voices above.

Come with us, come with us, from Felunsee.

voices below.

With what joy would we fly, through the upper sky!

We are washed, we are ’nointed, stark naked are we;

But our toil and our pain, is for ever in vain.

both chorusses.

The wind is still, the stars are fled,

The melancholy moon is dead;

The magic notes, like spark on spark,

Drizzle, whistling through the dark.

Come away!

voices below.

Stay, oh, stay!

voices above.

Out of the crannies of the rocks,

Who calls?

voices below.

Oh, let me join your flocks!

I, three hundred years have striven

To catch your skirt and mount to Heaven,—

And still in vain. Oh, might I be

With company akin to me!

both chorusses.

Some on a ram and some on a prong,

Edition: current; Page: [407]

On poles and on broomsticks we flutter along;

Forlorn is the wight, who can rise not to-night.

a half-witch below.

I have been tripping this many an hour:

Are the others already so far before?

No quiet at home, and no peace abroad!

And less methinks is found by the road.

chorus of witches.

Come onward away! aroint thee, aroint!

A witch to be strong must anoint—anoint—

Then every trough, will be boat enough;

With a rag for a sail we can sweep through the sky,

Who flies not to-night, when means he to fly?

both chorusses.

We cling to the skirt, and we strike on the ground;

Witch-legions thicken around and around;

Wizard-swarms cover the heath all over.

[They descend.

mephistopheles.

What thronging, dashing, raging, rustling;

What whispering, babbling, hissing, bustling;

What glimmering, spurting, stinking, burning,

As Heaven and Earth were overturning.

There is a true witch element about us,

Take hold on me, or we shall be divided:—

Where are you?

faust (from a distance.)

Here!

mephistopheles.

What

I must exert my authority in the house.

Place for young Voland! pray make way, good people.

Take hold on me, doctor, and with one step

Edition: current; Page: [408]

Let us escape from this unpleasant crowd:

They are too mad for people of my sort.

Just there shines a peculiar kind of light—

Something attracts me in those bushes. Come

This way: we shall slip down there in a minute.

faust.

Spirit of Contradiction! Well, lead on—

’Twere a wise feat indeed to wander out

Into the Brocken upon May-day night,

And then to isolate oneself in scorn,

Disgusted with the humours of the time.

mephistopheles.

See yonder, round a many-coloured flame

A merry club is huddled altogether:

Even with such little people as sit there

One would not be alone.

faust.

Would that I were

Up yonder in the glow and whirling smoke,

Where the blind million rush impetuously

To meet the evil ones; there might I solve

Many a riddle that torments me!

mephistopheles.

Yet

Many a riddle there is tied anew

Inextricably. Let the great world rage!

We will stay here safe in the quiet dwellings.

’Tis an old custom. Men have ever built

Their own small world in the great world of all.

I see young witches naked there, and old ones

Wisely attired with greater decency.

Be guided now by me, and you shall buy

Edition: current; Page: [409]

A pound of pleasure with a dram of trouble.

I hear them tune their instruments—one must

Get used to this damned scraping. Come, I’ll lead you

Among them; and what there you do and see,

As a fresh compact ’twixt us two shall be.

How say you now? this space is wide enough—

Look forth, you cannot see the end of it—

An hundred bonfires burn in rows, and they

Who throng around them seem innumerable:

Dancing and drinking, jabbering, making love,

And cooking, are at work. Now tell me, friend,

What is there better in the world than this?

faust.

In introducing us, do you assume

The character of wizard or of devil?

mephistopheles.

In truth, I generally go about

In strict incognito; and yet one likes

To wear one’s orders upon gala days.

I have no ribbon at my knee; but here

At home, the cloven foot is honourable.

See you that snail there?—she comes creeping up,

And with her feeling eyes hath smelt out something,

I could not, if I would, mask myself here.

Come now, we’ll go about from fire to fire:

I’ll be the pimp, and you shall be the lover.

[To some Old Women, who are sitting round a heap of glimmering coals.

Old gentlewomen, what do you do out here?

You ought to be with the young rioters

Right in the thickest of the revelry—

But every one is best content at home.

Edition: current; Page: [410]

general.

Who dare confide in right or a just claim?

So much as I had done for them! and now—

With women and the people ’tis the same,

Youth will stand foremost ever,—age may go

To the dark grave unhonoured.

minister.

Now-a-days

People assert their rights: they go too far;

But as for me, the good old times I praise;

Then we were all in all, ’twas something worth

One’s while to be in place and wear a star;

That was indeed the golden age on earth.

parvenu.*

We too are active, and we did and do

What we ought not, perhaps; and yet we now

Will seize, whilst all things are whirled round and round,

A spoke of Fortune’s wheel, and keep our ground.

author.

Who now can taste a treatise of deep sense

And ponderous volume? ’tis impertinence

To write what none will read, therefore will I

To please the young and thoughtless people try.

mephistopheles

(Who at once appears to have grown very old).

I find the people ripe for the last day,

Since I last came up to the wizard mountain;

And as my little cask runs turbid now,

So is the world drained to the dregs.

Edition: current; Page: [411]

pedlar-witch.

Look here,

Gentlemen; do not hurry on so fast

And lose the chance of a good pennyworth.

I have a pack full of the choicest wares

Of every sort, and yet in all my bundle

Is nothing like what may be found on earth;

Nothing that in a moment will make rich

Men and the world with fine malicious mischief—

There is no dagger drunk with blood; no bowl

From which consuming poison may be drained

By innocent and healthy lips; no jewel,

The price of an abandoned maiden’s shame;

No sword which cuts the bond it cannot loose,

Or stabs the wearer’s enemy in the back;

No—

mephistopheles.

Gossip, you know little of these times.

What has been, has been; what is done, is past.

They shape themselves into the innovations

They breed, and innovation drags us with it.

The torrent of the crowd sweeps over us,

You think to impel, and are yourself impelled.

faust.

Who is that yonder?

mephistopheles.

Mark her well. It is

Lilith.

faust.

Who?

mephistopheles.

Lilith, the first wife of Adam.

Edition: current; Page: [412]

Beware of her fair hair, for she excels

All women in the magic of her locks;

And when she winds them round a young man’s neck,

She will not ever set him free again.

faust.

There sit a girl and an old woman—they

Seem to be tired with pleasure and with play.

mephistopheles.

There is no rest to-night for any one:

When one dance ends another is begun;

Come, let us to it; We shall have rare fun.

[Faust dances and sings with a Girl, and Mephistopheles with an Old Woman.

brocto-phantasmist.

What is this cursed multitude about?

Have we not long since proved to demonstration

That ghosts move not on ordinary feet?

But these are dancing just like men and women.

the girl.

What does he want then at our ball?

faust.

Oh! he

Is far above us all in his conceit:

Whilst we enjoy, he reasons of enjoyment;

And any step which in our dance we tread,

If it be left out of his reckoning.

Is not to be considered as a step.

There are few things that scandalize him not:

And when you whirl round in the circle now,

As he went round the wheel in his old mill,

He says that you go wrong in all respects,

Edition: current; Page: [413]

Especially if you congratulate him

Upon the strength of the resemblance.

brocto-phantasmist.

Fly!

Vanish! Unheard of impudence! What, still there!

In this enlightened age too, since you have been

Proved not to exist!—But this infernal brood

Will hear no reason and endure no rule.

Are we so wise, and is the pond still haunted?

How long have I been sweeping out this rubbish

Of superstition, and the world will not

Come clean with all my pains!—it is a case

Unheard of!

the girl.

Then leave off teazing us so.

brocto-phantasmist.

I tell you, spirits, to your faces now,

That I should not regret this despotism

Of spirits, but that mine can wield it not.

To-night I shall make poor work of it,

Yet I will take a round with you, and hope

Before my last step in the living dance

To beat the poet and the devil together.

mephistopheles.

At last he will sit down in some foul puddle;

That is his way of solacing himself;

Until some leech, diverted with his gravity,

Cures him of spirits and the spirit together.

[To Faust, who has seceded from the dance.

Why do you let that fair girl pass from you,

Who sung so sweetly to you in the dance?

Edition: current; Page: [414]

faust.

A red mouse in the middle of her singing

Sprung from her mouth.

mephistopheles.

That was all right, my friend,

Be it enough that the mouse was not grey.

Do not disturb your hour of happiness

With close consideration of such trifles.

faust.

Then saw I—

mephistopheles.

What?

faust.

Seest thou not a pale

Fair girl, standing alone, far, far away?

She drags herself now forward with slow steps,

And seems as if she moved with shackled feet:

I cannot overcome the thought that she

Is like poor Margaret.

mephistopheles.

Let it be—pass on—

No good can come of it—it is not well

To meet it—it is an enchanted phantom,

A lifeless idol; with its numbing look,

It freezes up the blood of man; and they

Who meet its ghastly stare are turned to stone,

Like those who saw Medusa.

faust.

Oh, too true!

Her eyes are like the eyes of a fresh corpse

Which no beloved hand has closed, alas!

That is the heart which Margaret yielded to me—

Those are the lovely limbs which I enjoyed!

Edition: current; Page: [415]

mephistopheles.

It is all magic, poor deluded fool;

She looks to every one like his first love.

faust.

Oh, what delight! what woe! I cannot turn

My looks from her sweet piteous countenance.

How strangely does a single blood-red line,

Not broader than the sharp edge of a knife,

Adorn her lovely neck!

mephistopheles.

Aye, she can carry

Her head under her arm upon occasion;

Perseus has cut it off for her. These pleasures

End in delusion.—Gain this rising ground,

It is as airy here as in a []

And if I am not mightily deceived,

I see a theatre—What may this mean?

attendant.

Quite a new piece, the last of seven, for ’tis

The custom now to represent that number.

’Tis written by a Dilettante, and

The actors who perform are Dilettanti;

Excuse me, gentleman; but I must vanish,

I am a Dilettante curtain-lifter.

the end.

*

Ἰμεϰος, from which the river Himera was named, is, with some slight shade of difference, a synonyme of Love.

*

The favorite song, “Stanco di pascolar le peccorelle,” is a Brescian national air.

*

The Author was pursuing a fuller development of the ideal character of Athanase, when it struck him that in an attempt at extreme refinement and analysis, his conceptions might be betrayed into the assuming a morbid character. The reader will judge whether he is a loser or gainer by this difference.—Author’s Note.

*

The Author has connected many recollections of his visit to Pompeii and Baiæ with the enthusiasm excited by the intelligence of the proclamation of a Constitutional Government at Naples. This has given a tinge of picturesque and descriptive imagery to the introductory Epodes which depicture these scenes, and some of the majestic feelings permanently connected with the scene of this animating event.—Author’s Note.

†

Pompeii.

*

Homer and Virgil.

*

Ææa, the island of Circe.

†

The viper was the armorial device of the Visconti, tyrants of Milan.

*

This and the former poem were written at the request of a friend, to be inserted in a drama on the subject of Midas. Apollo and Pan contended before Tmolus for the prize in music.

*

Pumpkin.

*

This fragment is part of a poem which Mr. Shelley intended to write, founded on a story to be found in the first volume of a book entitled “L’Osservatore Fiorentino.”

*

This fragment refers to an event, told in Sismodi’s Histoire des Republiques Italiennes, which occurred during the war when Florence finally subdued Pisa, and reduced it to a province. The opening stanzas are addressed to the conquering city.

*

The Antistrophe is omitted.

*

I confess I do not understand this.—Note of the Author.

*

raphael.

The sun sounds, according to ancient custom,

In the song of emulation of his brother-spheres.

And its fore-written circle

Fulfills with a step of thunder.

Its countenance gives the Angels strength

Though no one can fathom it.

The incredible high works

Are excellent as at the first day.

gabriel.

And swift, and inconceivably swift

The adornment of earth winds itself round,

And exchanges Paradise-clearness

With deep dreadful night.

The sea foams in broad waves

From its deep bottom, up to the rocks,

And rocks and sea are torn on together

In the eternal swift course of the spheres.

michael.

And storms roar in emulation

From sea to land, from land to sea,

And make, raging, a chain

Of deepest operation round about.

There flames a flashing destruction

Before the path of the thunderbolt.

But thy servants, Lord, revere

The gentle alternations of thy day.

chorus.

Thy countenance gives the Angels strength,

Though none can comprehend thee:

And all thy lofty works

Are excellent as at the first day.

Such is a literal translation of this astonishing Chorus; it is impossible to represent in another language the melody of the versification; even the volatile strength and delicacy of the ideas escape in the crucible of translation, and the reader is surprised to find a caput mortuum.—Author’s Note.

*

A sort of fundholder.

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