Speeded with my sweet pipings.

The Sileni, and Sylvans, and Fauns,

And the Nymphs of the woods and waves, To the edge of the moist river-lawns,

And the brink of the dewy caves, And all that did then attend and follow, Were silent with love, as you now, Apollo, With envy of my sweet pipings.

I sang of the dancing stars,

I sang of the dædal Earth,
And of Heaven-and the giant wars,

And Love, and Death, and Birth,

And then I changed my pipings,Singing how down the vale of Menalus

I pursued a maiden and clasped a reed: Gods and men, we are all deluded thus !

It breaks in our bosom and then we bleed: All wept, as I think both ye now would, If envy or age had not frozen your blood, At the sorrow of my sweet pipings.

THE QUESTION.

I DREAMED that, as I wandered by the way, Bare winter suddenly was changed to spring, And gentle odours led my steps astray,

Mixed with a sound of waters murmuring Along a shelving bank of turf, which lay

Under a copse, and hardly dared to fling Its green arms round the bosom of the stream, But kissed it and then fled, as thou mightest in dream.

There grew pied wind-flowers and violets,

Daisies, those pearled Arcturi of the earth, The constellated flower that never sets;

Faint oxlips; tender blue bells, at whose birth The sod scarce heaved; and that tall flower that Its mother's face with heaven-collected tears, [wets When the low wind, its playmate's voice, it hears.

And in the warm hedge grew lush eglantine,

Green cow-bind and the moonlight-coloured May, And cherry blossoms, and white cups, whose wine Was the bright dew yet drained not by the day; And wild roses, and ivy serpentine,

With its dark buds and leaves, wandering astray; And flowers azure, black, and streaked with gold, Fairer than any wakened eyes behold.

And nearer to the river's trembling edge

There grew broad flag-flowers, purple prankt with And starry river buds among the sedge, [white, And floating water-lilies, broad and bright, Which lit the oak that overhung the hedge

With moonlight beams of their own watery light; And bulrushes, and reeds of such deep green As soothed the dazzled eye with sober sheen.

Methought that of these visionary flowers

I made a nosegay, bound in such a way That the same hues, which in their natural bowers Were mingled or opposed, the like array Kept these imprisoned children of the Hours Within my hand,-and then, elate and gay, I hastened to the spot whence I had come, That I might there present it !-Oh! to whom?

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 at night,
Within my heart is the lamp of love,
And that is day!

And the moon will smile 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
The clash of the hail sweeps over the plain—
Yon declining sun have overtaken,
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 moonlight flight thou then may'st 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
Round those hoar branches, aye renewing
That winged shape, for ever flies
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.

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 most 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
Of some machine portentous, or strange gin,
Which by the force of figured spells might win
Its way over the sea, and sport therein;
For round the walls are hung dread engines, such
As Vulcan never wrought for Jove to clutch
Ixion or the Titan :-or the quick
Wit of that man of God, St. Dominic,
To convince Atheist, Turk, or Heretic;
Or those in philosophic councils met,

Who thought to pay some interest for the debt
They owed to Jesus Christ for their salvation,
By giving a faint foretaste of damnation
To Shakspeare, Sidney, Spenser, and the rest
Who made our land an island of the blest,
When lamp-like Spain, who now relumes her fire
On Freedom's hearth, grew dim with Empire :—
With thumb-screws, wheels, with tooth and spike
and jag,

With fishes found under the utmost crag

Of Cornwall, and the storm-encompassed isles,
Where to the sky the rude sea seldom smiles
Unless in treacherous wrath, as on the morn
When the exulting elements in scorn
Satiated with destroyed destruction, lay
Sleeping in beauty on their mangled prey,
As panthers sleep :-and other strange and dread
Magical forms the brick-floor overspread--
Proteus transformed to metal did not make
More figures, or more strange; nor did he take
Such shapes of unintelligible brass,

Or heap himself in such a horrid mass
Of tin and iron not to be understood,

And forms of unimaginable wood,

To puzzle Tubal Cain and all his brood :

Great screws, and cones, and wheels, and grooved blocks,

The elements of what will stand the shocks
Of wave and wind and time.-Upon the table
More knacks and quips there be than I am able
To cataloguise in this verse of mine :-
A pretty bowl of wood--not full of wine,
But quicksilver; that dew which the gnomes drink
When at their subterranean toil they swink,

Pledging the demons of the earthquake, who
Reply to them in lava-cry, halloo !

And call out to the cities o'er their head,-
Roofs, towns, and shrines,-the dying and the dead
Crash through the chinks of earth-and then all

quaff

Another rouse, and hold their sides and laugh.
This quicksilver no gnome has drunk-within
The walnut-bowl it lies, veined and thin,

In colour like the wake of light that stains
The Tuscan deep, when from the moist moon rains
The inmost shower of its white fire-the breeze
Is still-blue heaven smiles over the pale seas.
And in this bowl of quicksilver—for I
Yield to the impulse of an infancy
Outlasting manhood-I have made to float
A rude idealism of a paper boat-

A hollow screw with cogs-Henry will know
The thing I mean, and laugh at me, if so
He fears not I should do more mischief. -Next
Lie bills and calculations much perplext,
With steam-boats, frigates, and machinery quaint
Traced over them in blue and yellow paint.
Then comes a range of mathematical
Instruments, for plans nautical and statical,
A heap of rosin, a green broken glass
With ink in it ;-a china cup that was
What it will never be again, I think,

A thing from which sweet lips were wont to drink
The liquor doctors rail at-and which I
Will quaff in spite of them-and when we die
We'll toss up who died first of drinking tea,
And cry out,-heads or tails? where'er we be.
Near that a dusty paint-box, some old hooks,
A half-burnt match, an ivory block, three books,
Where conic sections, spherics, logarithms,
To great Laplace, from Saunderson and Sims,
Lie heaped in their harmonious disarray
Of figures, disentangle them who may.
Baron de Tott's Memoirs beside them lie,
And some odd volumes of old chemistry.
Near them a most inexplicable thing,
With least in the middle-I'm conjecturing
How to make Henry understand ;—but—no,
I'll leave, as Spenser says, with many mo,
This secret in the pregnant womb of time,
Too vast a matter for so weak a rhyme.

And here like some weird Archimage sit I,
Plotting dark spells, and devilish enginery,
The self impelling steam-wheels of the mind
Which pump up oaths from clergymen, and grind
The gentle spirit of our meek reviews
Into a powdery foam of salt abuse,
Ruffling the ocean of their self-content
I sit and smile or sigh as is my bent,
But not for them--Libeccio rushes round
With an inconstant and an idle sound,

I heed him more than them-the thunder-smoke
Is gathering on the mountains, like a cloak
Folded athwart their shoulders broad and bare;
The ripe corn under the undulating air
Undulates like an ocean ;-and the vines
Are trembling wide in all their trellised lines ;-
The murmur of the awakening sea doth fill
The empty pauses of the blast ;-the hill
Looks hoary through the white electric rain,
And from the glens beyond, in sullen strain
The interrupted thunder howls; above
One chasm of heaven smiles, like the eye of love

On the unquiet world ;-while such things are, How could one worth your friendship heed the war Of worms? The shriek of the world's carrion

jays, Their censure, or their wonder, or their praise?

You are not here! The quaint witch Memory sees In vacant chairs your absent images,

And points where once you sat, and now should be,
But are not. I demand if ever we

Shall meet as then we met;-and she replies,
Veiling in awe her second-sighted eyes,
"I know the past alone-but summon home
My sister Hope, she speaks of all to come."
But I, an old diviner, who know well
Every false verse of that sweet oracle,
Turned to the sad enchantress once again,
And sought a respite from my gentle pain,
In acting every passage o'er and o'er

Of our communion.- How on the sea shore
We watched the ocean and the sky together,
Under the roof of blue Italian weather;
How I ran home through last year's thunder-storm,
And felt the transverse lightning linger warm
Upon my cheek and how we often made
Treats for each other, where good will outweighed
The frugal luxury of our country cheer,
As it well might, were it less firm and clear
Than ours must ever be ;-and how we spun
A shroud of talk to hide us from the sun
Of this familiar life, which seems to be
But is not, or is but quaint mockery
Of all we would believe; or sadly blame
The jarring and inexplicable frame

Of this wrong world :—and then anatomize
The purposes and thoughts of men whose eyes
Were closed in distant years ;-or widely guess
The issue of the earth's great business,
When we shall be as we no longer are;
Like babbling gossips safe, who hear the war
Of winds, and sigh, but tremble not; or how
You listened to some interrupted flow
Of visionary rhyme ;-in joy and pain
Struck from the inmost fountains of my brain,
With little skill perhaps ;-or how we sought
Those deepest wells of passion or of thought
Wrought by wise poets in the waste of years,
Staining the sacred waters with our tears;
Quenching a thirst ever to be renewed !
Or how I, wisest lady! then indued
The language of a land which now is free,
And winged with thoughts of truth and majesty,
Flits round the tyrant's sceptre like a cloud,
And bursts the peopled prisons, and cries aloud,
"My name is Legion !"-that majestic tongue,
Which Calderon over the desert flung
Of ages and of nations; and which found
An echo in our hearts, and with the sound
Startled oblivion ;-thou wert then to me
As is a nurse-when inarticulately

A child would talk as its grown parents do.
If living winds the rapid clouds pursue,
If hawks chase doves through the aerial way,
Huntsmen the innocent deer, and beasts their prey,
Why should not we rouse with the spirit's blast
Out of the forest of the pathless past
These recollected pleasures?

You are now

In London, that great sea, whose ebb and flow

At once is deaf and loud, and on the shore
Vomits its wrecks, and still howls on for more.
Yet in its depth what treasures! You will see
Your old friend Godwin, greater none than he ;
Though fallen on evil times, yet will he stand,
Among the spirits of our age and land,
Before the dread tribunal of To-come
The foremost, whilst rebuke stands pale and dumb.
You will see Coleridge; he who sits obscure
In the exceeding lustre and the pure
Intense irradiation of a mind,

Which, with its own internal lustre blind,
Flags wearily through darkness and despair—
A cloud-encircled meteor of the air,

A hooded eagle among blinking owls.
You will see Hunt; one of those happy souls
Which are the salt of the earth, and without whom
This world would smell like what it is-a tomb;
Who is, what others seem :-his room no doubt
Is still adorned by many a cast from Shout,
With graceful flowers, tastefully placed about;
And coronals of bay from ribbons hung,
And brighter wreaths in neat disorder flung,
The gifts of the most learned among some dozens
Of female friends, sisters-in-law and cousins.
And there is he with his eternal puns,
Which beat the dullest brain for smiles, like duns
Thundering for money at a poet's door;
Alas! it is no use to say, "I'm poor!"
Or oft in graver mood, when he will look
Things wiser than were ever said in book,
Except in Shakspeare's wisest tenderness.
You will see H-, and I cannot express
His virtues, though I know that they are great,
Because he locks, then barricades, the gate
Within which they inhabit ;-of his wit,
And wisdom, you'll cry out when you are bit.
He is a pearl within an oyster-shell,
One of the richest of the deep. And there
Is English P- with his mountain Fair
Turned into a Flamingo,-that shy bird
That gleams i'the Indian air. Have you not heard
When a man marries, dies, or turns Hindoo,
His best friends hear no more of him? but you
Will see him, and will like him too, I hope,
With the milk-white Snowdonian Antelope
Matched with his camelopard, his fine wit
Makes such a wound, the knife is lost in it;
A strain too learned for a shallow age,
Too wise for selfish bigots ;-let his page,
Which charms the chosen spirits of the age,
Fold itself up for a serener clime

Of years to come, and find its recompense
In that just expectation. Wit and sense,
Virtue and human knowledge, all that might
Make this dull world a business of delight,
Are all combined in Horace Smith.-And these,
With some exceptions, which I need not teaze
Your patience by descanting on, are all
You and I know in London.

I recall

My thoughts, and bid you look upon the night:
As water does a sponge, so the moonlight
Fills the void, hollow, universal air.
What see you?-Unpavilioned heaven is fair,
Whether the moon, into her chamber gone,
Leaves midnight to the golden stars, or wan
Climbs with diminished beams the azure steep;
Or whether clouds sail o'er the inverse deep,

Piloted by the many-wandering blast, And the rare stars rush through them, dim and fast.

All this is beautiful in every land.

But what see you beside ? A shabby stand
Of hackney-coaches-a brick house or wall
Fencing some lonely court, white with the scrawl
Of our unhappy politics ;-or worse-
A wretched woman reeling by, whose curse
Mixed with the watchman's, partner of her trade,
You must accept in place of serenade-
Or yellow-haired Pollonia murmuring
To Henry, some unutterable thing.

I see a chaos of green leaves and fruit
Built round dark caverns, even to the root

Of the living stems who feed them; in whose bowers

There sleep in their dark dew the folded flowers;
Beyond, the surface of the unsickled corn
Trembles not in the slumbering air, and borne
In circles quaint, and ever-changing dance,
Like winged stars the fire-flies flash and glance
Pale in the open moonshine; but each one
Under the dark trees seems a little sun,
A meteor tamed; a fixed star gone astray
From the silver regions of the Milky-way.
Afar the Contadino's song is heard,

Rude, but made sweet by distance ;--and a bird
Which cannot be a nightingale, and yet
I know none else that sings so sweet as it
At this late hour ;-and then all is still :-
Now Italy or London, which you will!

Next winter you must pass with me; I'll have
My house by that time turned into a grave
Of dead despondence and low-thoughted care,
And all the dreams which our tormentors are.
O that Hunt and
were there,

With every thing belonging to them fair!—
We will have books; Spanish, Italian, Greek,
And ask one week to make another week
As like his father, as I'm unlike mine.
Though we eat little flesh and drink no wine,
Yet let's be merry; we'll have tea and toast;
Custards for supper, and an endless host
Of syllabubs and jellies and mince-pies,
And other such lady-like luxuries,—
Feasting on which we will philosophise.

And we'll have fires out of the Grand Duke's wood,

To thaw the six weeks' winter in our blood.
And then we'll talk ;—what shall we talk about?
Oh! there are themes enough for many a bout
Of thought-entangled descant; as to nerves-
With cones and parallelograms and curves
I've sworn to strangle them if once they dare
To bother me,-when you are with me there.
And they shall never more sip laudanum
From Helicon or Himeros ;*-well, come,
And in spite of *** and of the devil,
We'll make our friendly philosophic revel
Outlast the leafless time;-till buds and flowers
Warn the obscure inevitable hours
Sweet meeting by sad parting to renew:-
"To-morrow to fresh woods and pastures new."

* "Iμepos, from which the river Himera was named, is, with some slight shade of difference, a synonyme of Love.