LINES.

I.

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.

II.

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.

III.

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.

IV.

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.

ΤΟ

YET look on me take not thine eyes away,

Which feed upon the love within mine own Which is indeed but the reflected ray

Of thine own beauty from my spirit thrown Yet speak to me thy voice is as the tone

Of my heart's echo, and I think I hear

That thou yet lovest me; yet thou alone Like one before a mirror, without care

Of aught but thine own features, imaged ther And yet I wear out life in watching thee;

A toil so sweet at times, and thou indeed Art kind when I am sick, and pity me.

MONT BLANC.

LINES WRITTEN IN THE VALE OF CHAMOUNI.

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
with a sound but half its own,

Of waters,

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,
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 recalls them, thou art there!

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