Childhood and youth, friendship, and love's first glow,
Have fled like sweet dreams, leaving thee to mourn.
These common woes I feel. One loss is mine,

Which thou too feel'st, yet I alone deplore.
Thou wert as a lone star whose light did shine
On some frail bark in winter's midnight roar:
Thou hast like to a rock-built refuge stood
Above the blind and battling multitude;
In honoured poverty thy voice did weave
Songs consecrate to truth and liberty.
Deserting these, thou leavest me to grieve,

Thus, having been, that thou shouldst cease to be.

FEELINGS OF A REPUBLICAN ON THE FALL OF BONAPARTE.

I HATED thee, fallen Tyrant! I did groan

To think that a most unambitious slave,

Like thou, should dance and revel on the grave
Of Liberty. Thou mightst have built thy throne
Where it had stood even now: thou didst prefer

A frail and bloody pomp, which Time has swept
In fragments towards oblivion. Massacre,

For this, I prayed, would on thy sleep have crept,
Treason and Slavery, Rapine, Fear, and Lust,

And stifled thee their minister. I know
Too late, since thou and France are in the dust,
That Virtue owns a more eternal foe

Than Force or Fraud: old Custom, Legal Crime,
And bloody Faith, the foulest birth of Time.

LINES.

1. 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.

2. 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.

3. 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.

4. 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.

POEMS WRITTEN IN 1816.

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 death 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.
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 torn 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.
Bishopgate, Spring 1816.

HYMN TO INTELLECTUAL BEAUTY.

1. THE awful shadow of some unseen Power
Floats, though unseen, among us; visiting
This various world with as inconstant wing
As summer winds that creep from flower to flower.
Like moonbeams that behind some piny mountain shower,
It visits with inconstant glance

Each human heart and countenance;

Like hues and harmonies of evening,

Like clouds in starlight widely spread,

Like memory of music fled,

Like aught that for its grace may be

Dear, and yet dearer for its mystery.

2. Spirit of BEAUTY, that dost consecrate

With thine own hues all thou dost shine upon
Of human thought or form, where art thou gone?
Why dost thou pass away, and leave our state,
This dim vast vale of tears, vacant and desolate ?—
Ask why the sunlight not for ever

Weaves rainbows o'er yon mountain river;

Why aught should fail and fade that once is shown

Why fear and dream and death and birth
Cast on the daylight of this earth

Such gloom; why man has such a scope
For love and hate, despondency and hope!

3. No voice from some sublimer world hath ever To sage or poet these responses given :

Therefore the names of Demon, Ghost, and Heaven,
Remain the records of their vain endeavour;

Frail spells, whose uttered charm might not avail to sever,
From all we hear and all we see,

Doubt, chance, and mutability.

Thy light alone, like mist o'er mountains driven,
Ör music by the night-wind sent

Through strings of some still instrument,
Or moonlight on a midnight stream,

Gives grace and truth to life's unquiet dream.
4. Love, hope, and self-esteem, like clouds depart
And come, for some uncertain moments lent.
Man were immortal and omnipotent,

Didst thou, unknown and awful as thou art,
Keep with thy glorious train firm state within his heart.
Thou messenger of sympathies

That wax and wane in lovers' eyes!

Thou that to human thought art nourishment,
Like darkness to a dying flame !

Depart not as thy shadow came :

Depart not, lest the grave should be,

Like life and fear, a dark reality!

5. While yet a boy, I sought for ghosts, and sped
Through many a listening chamber, cave, and ruin,
And starlight wood, with fearful steps pursuing
Hopes of high talk with the departed dead.

I called on poisonous names with which our youth is fed.
I was not heard, I saw them not;

When, musing deeply on the lot

Of life, at that sweet time when winds are wooing
All vital things that wake to bring
News of birds and blossoming,
Sudden thy shadow fell on me :-

I shrieked, and clasped my hands in ecstasy!

6. I vowed that I would dedicate my powers

To thee and thine: have I not kept the vow?

With beating heart and streaming eyes, even now

I call the phantoms of a thousand hours

Each from his voiceless grave. They have in visioned bowers
Of studious zeal or love's delight

Outwatched with me the envious night :
They know that never joy illumed my brow,
Unlinked with hope that thou wouldst free