The winged seeds, where they lie cold and

low,

Each like a corpse within its grave, until Thine azure sister of the spring shall blow

Her clarion o'er the dreaming earth, and fill (Driving sweet buds like flocks to feed in air)

With living hues and odors plain and hill:

Wild Spirit, which art moving everywhere; Destroyer and preserver; hear, O hear!

II.

Thou on whose stream, mid the steep sky's commotion,

Loose clouds like earth's decaying leaves are

shed,

Shook from the tangled boughs of Heaven and Ocean,

Angels of rain and lightning: there are spread

On the blue surface of thine airy surge,

Like the bright hair uplifted from the head

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 vapors, from whose solid atmosphere Black rain, and fire, and hail, will burst: O hear!

III.

Thou who didst waken from his summer dreams

The blue Mediterranean, where he lay,
Lulled by the coil of his crystalline streams,

Beside a pumice isle in Baia's bay,
And saw in sleep old palaces and towers
Quivering within the wave's intenser day,

All overgrown with azure moss and flowers So sweet, the sense faints picturing them! thou

For whose path the Atlantic's level powers

Cleave themselves into chasms, while far

below

The sea-blooms and the oozy woods which

wear

The sapless foliage of the ocean, know

Thy voice, and suddenly grow gray with fear, And tremble and despoil themselves: O hear!

IV.

If I were a dead leaf thou mightest bear;
If I were a swift cloud to fly with thee;
A wave to pant beneath thy power, and
share

The impulse of thy strength, only less free
Than thou, O uncontrollable! if even
I were as in my boyhood, and could be

The comrade of thy wanderings over heaven,
As then, when to outstrip thy skyey speed
Scarce seemed a vision, I would ne'er have
striven

As thus with thee in prayer in my sore need. O, lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud!

I fall upon the thorns of life; I bleed !

A heavy weight of hours has chained and bowed

One too like thee; tameless, and swift, and

proud.

V.

Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is : What if my leaves are falling like its own! 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 universe Like withered leaves to quicken a new birth; And, by the incantation of this verse,

Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth Ashes and sparks, my words among 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.

HAMELEONS 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: