The spirit of the worm beneath the sod, In love and worship, blends itself with God.
Spouse! Sister! Angel! Pilot of the Fate Whose course has been so starless! O too late Beloved, O too soon adored, by me! For in the fields of immortality
My spirit should at first have worshipped thine, A divine presence in a place divine;
Or should have moved beside it on this earth, A shadow of that substance, from its birth; But not as now:-I love thee; yes, I feel That on the fountain of my heart a seal Is set, to keep its waters pure and bright For thee, since in those tears thou hast delight. We are we not formed, as notes of music are, For one another, though dissimilar;
Such difference without discord, as can make Those sweetest sounds, in which all spirits shake, As trembling leaves in a continuous air?
Thy wisdom speaks in me, and bids me dare Beacon the rocks on which high hearts are wreckt I never was attached to that great sect, Whose doctrine is, that each one should select Out of the crowd a mistress or a friend,
And all the rest, though fair and wise, commend To cold oblivion, though it is the code * Of modern morals, and the beaten road
Former reading, in the code.
Which those poor slaves with weary footsteps
Who travel to their home among the dead By the broad highway of the world, and so With one chained friend, perhaps a jealous foe, The dreariest and the longest journey go.
True Love in this differs from gold and clay, That to divide is not to take away. Love is like understanding, that grows bright, Gazing on many truths; 'tis like thy light, Imagination! which, from earth and sky, And from the depths of human phantasy, As from a thousand prisms and mirrors, fills The Universe with glorious beams, and kills Error, the worm, with many a sun-like arrow Of its reverberated lightning. Narrow The heart that loves, the brain that contemplates, The life that wears, the spirit that creates One object, and one form, and builds thereby A sepulchre for its eternity.
Mind from its object differs most in this; Evil from good; misery from happiness; The baser from the nobler; the impure And frail, from what is clear and must endure : If you divide suffering and dross, you may Diminish till it is consumed away;
If you divide pleasure and love and thought, Each part exceeds the whole; and we know not
How much, while any yet remains unshared, Of pleasure may be gained, of sorrow spared. This truth is that deep well, whence sages draw The unenvied light of hope; the eternal law By which those live, to whom this world of life Is as a garden ravaged, and whose strife Tills for the promise of a later birth The wilderness of this Elysian earth.
There was a Being whom my spirit oft Met on its visioned wanderings, far aloft, In the clear golden prime of my youth's dawn, Upon the fairy isles of sunny lawn,
Amid the enchanted mountains, and the caves Of divine sleep, and on the air-like waves Of wonder-level dream, whose tremulous floor Paved her light steps ;-on an imagined shore, Under the gray beak of some promontory She met me, robed in such exceeding glory, That I beheld her not. In solitudes [woods, Her voice came to me through the whispering And from the fountains, and the odours deep Of flowers, which, like lips murmuring in their
Of the sweet kisses which had lulled them there, Breathed but of her to the enamoured air; And from the breezes whether low or loud, And from the rain of every passing cloud, And from the singing of the summer-birds, And from all sounds, all silence; in the words
Of antique verse and high romance,-in form, Sound, colour-in whatever checks that storm Which with the shattered present chokes the past; And in that best philosophy, whose taste Makes this cold common hell, our life, a doom As glorious as a fiery martyrdom:
Her spirit was the harmony of truth.
Then, from the caverns of my dreamy youth I sprang, as one sandalled with plumes of fire, And towards the loadstar of my one desire I flitted, like a dizzy moth, whose flight Is as a dead leaf's in the owlet light,
When it would seek in Hesper's setting sphere A radiant death, a fiery sepulchre,
As if it were a lamp of earthly flame.
But She, whom prayers or tears then could not Past, like a god throned on a winged planet, Whose burning plumes to tenfold swiftness fan it, Into the dreary cone of our life's shade; And as a man with mighty loss dismayed, I would have followed, though the grave between Yawned like a gulf whose spectres are unseen: When a voice said :-"O thou of hearts the
The phantom is beside thee whom thou seekest." Then I-" Where?" the world's echo answered
And in that silence, and in my despair,
I questioned every tongueless wind that flew Over my tower of mourning, if it knew
Whither 'twas fled, this soul out of my soul; [trol And murmured names and spells which have con- Over the sightless tyrants of our fate;
But neither prayer nor verse could dissipate The night which closed on her; nor uncreate That world within this Chaos, mine and me, Of which she was the veiled Divinity,- The world I say of thoughts that worshipped her: And therefore I went forth, with hope and fear, And every gentle passion sick to death, Feeding my course with expectation's breath, Into the wintry forest of our life;
And struggling through its error with vain strife, And stumbling in my weakness and my haste, And half bewildered by new forms, I past Seeking among those untaught foresters If I could find one form resembling hers, In which she might have masked herself from me. There,-One, whose voice was venomed melody Sat by a well, under blue night-shade bowers: The breath of her false mouth was like faint
Her touch was as electric poison,-flame Out of her looks into my vitals came;
And from her living checks and bosom flew A killing air, which pierced like honey-dew Into the core of my green heart, and lay Upon its leaves; until, as hair grown gray O'er a young brow, they hid its unblown prime With ruins of unseasonable time.
of Beauty - Aphrodità
the description of this lower love
Pandemos. compares wilt that devalt on
Which Shelley, afterwards epeating of this poem, refert. – S. A Brake
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