VII.

What thou art we know not;

What is most like thee?

From rainbow clouds there flow not

Drops so bright to see

As from thy presence showers a rain of melody :-

VIII.

Like a poet hidden

In the light of thought,
Singing hymns unbidden,

Till the world is wrought

To sympathy with hopes and fears it heeded not:

IX.

Like a high-born maiden

In a palace tower,
Soothing her love-laden

Soul in secret hour

With music sweet as love which overflows her bower:

X.

Like a glow-worm golden

In a dell of dew,

Scattering unbeholden

Its aërial hue

Among the flowers and grass which screen it from the view:

XI.

Like a rose embowered

In its own green leaves,

By warm winds deflowered,

Till the scent it gives

Makes faint with too much sweet these heavy-winged thieves.

XII.

Sound of vernal showers

On the twinkling grass,
Rain-awakened flowers,-

All that ever was,

Joyous and clear and fresh,-thy music doth surpass.

XIII.

Teach us, sprite or bird,

What sweet thoughts are thine:

I have never heard

Praise of love or wine

That panted forth a flood of rapture so divine.

XIV.

Chorus hymeneal

Or triumphal chant,

Matched with thine, would be all

But an empty vaunt

A thing wherein we feel there is some hidden want.

XV.

What objects are the fountains

Of thy happy strain?

What fields, or waves, or mountains?

What shapes of sky or plain?

What love of thine own kind? what ignorance of pain?

XVI.

With thy clear keen joyance

Languor cannot be:

Shadow of annoyance

Never came near thee:

Thou lovest, but ne'er knew love's sad satiety.

XVII.

Waking or asleep,

Thou of death must deem

Things more true and deep

Than we mortals dream,

Or how could thy notes flow in such a crystal stream?

XVIII.

We look before and after,

And pine for what is not:

Our sincerest laughter

With some pain is fraught;

Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.

XIX.

Yet, if we could scorn

Hate and pride and fear,

If we were things born

Not to shed a tear,

I know not how thy joy we ever should come near.

VOL. II.

XX.

Better than all measures

Of delightful sound,
Better than all treasures

That in books are found,

Thy skill to poet were, thou scorner of the ground!

XXI.

Teach me half the gladness

That thy brain must know;

Such harmonious madness

From my lips would flow

The world should listen then as I am listening now.

ΤΟ

I FEAR thy kisses, gentle maiden;
Thou needest not fear mine,-
My spirit is too deeply laden

Ever to burthen thine.

I fear thy mien, thy tones, thy motion;
Thou needest not fear mine,—

Innocent is the heart's devotion

With which I worship thine.

THE TWO SPIRITS.

AN ALLEGORY.

FIRST SPIRIT.

O THOU who plumed with strong desire
Wouldst float above the earth, beware!
A shadow tracks thy flight of fire-

Night is coming!

Bright are the regions of the air,
And among the winds and beams
It were delight to wander there-
Night is coming!

SECOND SPIRIT.

The deathless stars are bright above:
If I would cross the shade of night,

Within my heart is the lamp of love,
And that is day;

And the moon will shine with gentle light
On my golden plumes where'er they move;
The meteors will linger round my flight,
And make night day.

FIRST SPIRIT.

But if the whirlwinds of darkness waken
Hail and lightning and stormy rain?
See, the bounds of the air are shaken-
Night is coming!

The red swift clouds of the hurricane

Yon declining sun have overtaken,

The clash of the hail sweeps over the plain-
Night is coming!

SECOND SPIRIT.

I see the light, and I hear the sound.

I'll sail on the flood of the tempest dark, With the calm within and the light around Which makes night day:

And thou, when the gloom is deep and stark, Look from thy dull earth, slumber-bound; My moonlike flight thou then mayst mark On high, far away.

Some say there is a precipice

Where one vast pine is frozen to ruin O'er piles of snow and chasms of ice

'Mid Alpine mountains;

And that the languid storm, pursuing

That winged shape, for ever flies

Round those hoar branches, aye renewing

Its aëry fountains.

Some say, when nights are dry and clear,
And the death-dews sleep on the morass,
Sweet whispers are heard by the traveller,
Which make night day:

And a silver shape like his early love doth pass,
Upborne by her wild and glittering hair;

And, when he awakes on the fragrant grass,
He finds night day.

SONG OF PROSERPINE,

WHILST GATHERING FLOWERS ON THE PLAIN OF ENNA.

SACRED Goddess, Mother Earth,

Thou from whose immortal bosom
Gods and men and beasts have birth,
Leaf and blade, and bud and blossom,
Breathe thine influence most divine
On thine own child, Proserpine.

If with mists of evening dew

Thou dost nourish these young flowers
Till they grow in scent and hue

Fairest children of the Hours,

Breathe thine influence most divine
On thine own child, Proserpine.

LETTER TO MARIA GISBORNE.

LEGHORN, July 1, 1820.

THE spider spreads her webs, whether she be
In poet's tower, cellar, or barn, or tree;
The silkworm in the dark-green mulberry leaves
His winding-sheet and cradle ever weaves:

So I, a thing whom moralists call worm,
Sit spinning still round this decaying form,

From the fine threads of rare and subtle thought-
No net of words in garish colours wrought

To catch the idle buzzers of the day

But a soft cell where, when that fades away,
Memory may clothe in wings my living name,

And feed it with the asphodels of fame

Which in those hearts which must remember me
Grow, making love an immortality.

Whoever should behold me now, I wist,
Would think I were a mighty mechanist,
Bent with sublime Archimedean art
To breathe a soul into the iron heart