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Phantom may

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Glory, glory, glory,

To those who have greatly suffered and done!

Never name in story

Was greater than that which ye shall have won.

Conquerors have conquered their foes alone,

Whose revenge, pride, and power they have overthrown:

Burst, to illumine our tempestuous day. Ride ye, more victorious, over your own.

Bind, bind every brow With crownals of violet, ivy, and pine :

Hide the blood-stains now

With hues which sweet nature has

made divine:

And swift stars with flashing tresses; And icy moons most cold and bright, And mighty suns beyond the night, Atoms of intensest light.

Even thy name is as a god,

Green strength, azure hope, and eter- Heaven! for thou art the abode

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Of that power which is the glass Wherein mat his nature sees. Generations as they pass Worship thee with bended knees. Their unremaining gods and they Like a river roll away:

Thou remainest such alway.

Second Spirit

Thou art but the mind's first chamber,
Round which its young fancies clamber,
Like weak insects in a cave,
Lighted up by stalactites;

But the portal of the grave,
Where a world of new delights
Will make thy best glories seem
But a dim and noonday gleam
From the shadow of a dream!

Third Spirit

Peace! the abyss is wreathed with scorn At your presumption, atom-born!

What is heaven? and what are ye Who its brief expanse inherit?

What are suns and spheres which flee
With the instinct of that spirit
Of which ye are but a part?
Drops which Nature's mighty heart
De-
Drives through thinnest veins !
part!

What is heaven? a globe of dew,
Filling in the morning new

Some eyed flower whose young leaves
waken

On an unimagined world :

Constellated suns unshaken,
Orbits measureless, are furled
In that frail and fading sphere,
With ten millions gathered there,
To tremble, gleam, and disappear.

ODE TO THE WEST WIND1

I

Shook from the tangled boughs of Heaven and Ocean,

O WILD West Wind, thou breath of Angels of rain and lightning: there are

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Thou, from whose unseen presence the On the blue surface of thine airy surge, Like the bright hair uplifted from the head

leaves dead

Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing,

Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red,

Pestilence-stricken multitudes: O thou, Who chariotest to their dark wintry bed

The winged seeds, where they lie cold and low,

Each like a corpse within its grave,

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Of some fierce Mænad, even from the dim verge

Of the horizon to the zenith's height The locks of the approaching storm. Thou dirge

Of the dying year, to which this closing night

Will be the dome of a vast sepulchre, Vaulted with all thy congregated might

Of vapours, from whose solid atmosphere

Black rain, and fire, and hail will burst:

Oh hear !

III

Thou who didst waken from his summer dreams

Wild Spirit, which art moving every- The blue Mediterranean, where he lay,

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overgrown with azure moss and flowers

1 This poem was conceived and chiefly written All in a wood that skirts the Arno, near Florence, and on a day when that tempestuous wind, whose temperature is at once mild and animat So sweet, the sense faints picturing them! ing, was collecting the vapours which pour down

Thou

the autumnal rains. They began, as I foresaw, For whose path the Atlantic's level

at sunset with a violent tempest of hail and rain, attended by that magnificent thunder and lightning peculiar to the Cisalpine regions.

The phenomenon alluded to at the conclusion

powers

Cleave themselves into chasms, while far below

of the third stanza is well known to naturalists.
The vegetation at the bottom of the sea, of
rivers, and of lakes, sympathises with that The
of the land in the change of seasons, and is
consequently influenced by the winds which
announce it.

sea-blooms and the oozy woods which wear

The sapless foliage of the ocean, know

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Thy voice, and suddenly grow gray with Scatter, as from an

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unextinguished

And tremble and despoil themselves: Ashes and sparks, my words among

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The tumult of thy mighty harmonies

Will take from both a deep, autumnal tone,

Sweet though in sadness. Be thou, spirit fierce,

My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one!

Drive my dead thoughts over the uni

verse

Like withered leaves to quicken a new birth!

And, by the incantation of this verse,

mankind!

Be through my lips to unawakened earth

The trumpet of a prophecy! O, wind, If Winter comes, can Spring be far

behind?

AN EXHORTATION
CHAMELEONS feed on light and air:
Poets' food is love and fame:
If in this wide world of care

Poets could but find the same
With as little toil as they,

Would they ever change their hue As the light chameleons do, Suiting it to every ray

Twenty times a day?

Poets are on this cold earth,

As chameleons might be,
Hidden from their early birth
In a cave beneath the sea;
Where light is, chameleons change:
Where love is not, poets do:
Fame is love disguised: if few
Find either never think it strange
That poets range.

Yet dare not stain with wealth or power
A poet's free and heavenly mind:
If bright chameleons should devour

Any food but beams and wind,
They would grow as earthly soon
As their brother lizards are.
Children of a sunnier star,
Spirits from beyond the moon,
Oh refuse the boon!

THE INDIAN SERENADE

I

I ARISE from dreams of thee
In the first sweet sleep of night,
When the winds are breathing low,

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