By gadflies, they have piled the heath and gums and wood.

XLIII

Night came, a starless and a moonless gloom.

Until the dawn, those hosts of many a nation

Stood round that pile, as near one lover's tomb

To see his enemies writhe and burn and bleed,

And that, till then, the snakes of hell had need

Of human souls:-1 three-hundred furnaces

Soon blazed through the wide City, where, with speed,

Men brought their infidel kindred to appease

The power of light in vain, tossed restlessly

which alone

tempestuous sea.

III

It was a stream of living beams, whose bank

On either side by the cloud's cleft was made;

And, where its chasms that flood of glory drank,

Its waves gushed forth like fire, and, as if swayed

By some mute tempest, rolled on her; the shade

Of her bright image floated on the river

Of liquid light, which then did end and fade

Her radiant shape upon its verge did shiver;

Aloft, her flowing hair like strings of flame did quiver.

IV

I stood beside her, but she saw me

not

She looked upon the sea, and skies, and earth;

Rapture and love and admiration wrought

A passion deeper far than tears or mirth,

Or speech or gesture, or whate'er has birth

Of Hell: each girt by the hot atmosphere

Of his blind agony, like a scorpion stung

By his own rage upon his burning bier

Of circling coals of fire; but still there clung

Which now the cold winds stole ;

she would have laid

Upon my languid heart her dearest head;

I might have heard her voice, tender and sweet;

Her eyes, mingling with mine, might soon have fed

My soul with their own joy.--One moment yet

I gazed-we parted then, never again

to meet !

threads uphung :

IX

Not death-death was no more refuge

or rest;

Not life--it was despair to be!

not sleep,

For fiends and chasms of fire had dis

possest

All natural dreams; to wake was

not to weep,

But to gaze, mad and pallid, at the

leap