But my 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; 11
Sweet lips! he who hath
On my desolate path
Cast the darkness of absence, worse than death! (The ENCHANTRESS makes her spell: she is answered by a SPIRIT.)
Within the silent centre of the earth
My mansion is; where I have 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.
[ANOTHER SCENE.] INDIAN YOUTH and LADY. INDIAN.
And if my grief should still be dearer to me
lines are divided from what follows them in Mrs. Shelley's editions by the statement that "a good Spirit, who watches over the Pirate's fate, leads, in a mysterious manner, the lady of his love to the Enchanted Isle. She is accompanied by a youth, who loves the lady, but whose passion she returns only with a sisterly affection."-ED.
Than all the pleasures in the world beside,
Why would you lighten it ?—
That which I seek, some human sympathy
In this mysterious island.
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.
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.
And thou lovest not? if so,
Young as thou art thou canst afford to weep.
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 50
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.
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. 60
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 her own,
The crane returned to her unfrozen haunt, 70 And the false cuckoo bade the Spring good
And on a wintry bough the widowed bird,
Hid in the deepest night of ivy-leaves,
Renewed the vigils of a sleepless sorrow.
I, left like her, and leaving one like her,
Alike abandoned and abandoning
(Oh! unlike her in this!) the gentlest youth, Whose love had made my sorrows dear to him, Even as my sorrow made his love to me!
One curse of Nature stamps in the same mould The features of the wretched; and they are 81 As like as violet to violet,
When memory, the ghost, their odours keeps 'Mid the cold relics of abandoned joy.— Proceed.
He was a simple innocent boy.
I loved him well, but not as he desired;
Yet even thus he was content to be:-
A short content, for I was
From such an islet, such a river-spring...!
I dare not ask her if there stood upon it
A pleasure-dome surmounted by a crescent,
With steps to the blue water. (Aloud) It
may be
That Nature masks in life several copies
Of the same lot, so that the sufferers
May feel another's sorrow as their own,
And find in friendship what they lost in love.
That cannot be: yet it is strange that we,
From the same scene, by the same path to this
Realm of abandonment . . But speak! your
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-
1 This combination of words is sufficiently marked to be recorded as another reminiscence of Coleridge's Kubla Khan:
A lofty pleasure-dome with caves of ice.-ED.
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
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
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.
Is he who was the winter of my peace.
But, fairest stranger, when didst thou depart From the far hills where rise the springs of India,
How didst thou pass the intervening sea?
If I be sure I am not dreaming now,
I should not doubt to say it was a dream.
Methought a star came down from heaven,
And rested 'mid the plants of India,
Which I had given a shelter from the frost
Within my chamber. There the meteor lay, 130
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