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XVIII.

Come Thou, but lead out of the inmost cave

Of man's deep spirit, as the morning-star Beckons the Sun from the Eoan wave,

Wisdom. I hear the pennons of her car

Self-moving, like cloud charioted by flame;

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Comes she not, and come ye not,

Rulers of eternal thought,

To judge, with solemn truth, life's ill-apportioned lot?
Blind Love, and equal Justice, and the Fame

Of what has been, the Hope of what will be?
O, Liberty! if such could be thy name

Wert thou disjoined from these, or they from thee:

If thine or theirs were treasures to be bought

By blood or tears, have not the wise and free

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Wept tears, and blood like tears? The solemn harmony 270

XIX.

Paused, and the spirit of that mighty singing
To its abyss was suddenly withdrawn;
Then, as a wild swan, when sublimely winging
Its path athwart the thunder-smoke of dawn,
Sinks headlong through the aërial golden light

On the heavy sounding plain,

When the bolt has pierced its brain;

As summer clouds dissolve, unburthened of their rain;
As a far taper fades with fading night,

As a brief insect dies with dying day,

My song, its pinions disarrayed of might,

Drooped; o'er it closed the echoes far away

Of the great voice which did its flight sustain,
As waves which lately paved his watery way

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Hiss round a drowner's head in their tempestuous play. 285 Spring, 1820.

ARETHUSA.

I.

ARETHUSA arose

From her couch of snows

In the Acroceraunian mountains,

From cloud and from crag,

With many a jag,

Shepherding her bright fountains.

She leapt down the rocks,

With her rainbow locks Streaming among the streams;

Her steps paved with green

The downward ravine

Which slopes to the western gleams:

And gliding and springing

She went, ever singing,

In murmurs as soft as sleep;

The Earth seemed to love her,

And Heaven smiled above her,

As she lingered towards the deep.

II.

Then Alpheus bold,

On his glacier cold,

With his trident the mountains strook

And opened a chasm.

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In the rocks;

with the spasm

All Erymanthus shook.

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And the black south wind

It concealed behind

The urns of the silent snow,

And earthquake and thunder
Did rend in sunder

[blocks in formation]

Over heaps of unvalued stones;

Through the dim beams

Which amid the streams

Weave a net-work of coloured light;
And under the caves,

Where the shadowy waves

Are as green as the forest's night:
Outspeeding the shark

And the sword-fish dark,

Under the ocean foam,

And up through the rifts

Of the mountain clifts

They passed to their Dorian home.

V.

And now from their fountains

In Enna's mountains,

Down one vale where the morning basks,

Like friends once parted

Grown single-hearted,

They ply their watery tasks.

At sunrise they leap

From their cradles steep

In the cave of the shelving hill;
At noon-tide they flow
Through the woods below
And the meadows of Asphodel;
And at night they sleep
In the rocking deep

Beneath the Ortygian shore;

Like spirits that lie

In the azure sky

When they love but live no more.

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ΤΟ

I.

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

Ever to burthen thine.

II.

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

Innocent is the heart's devotion

With which I worship thine.

1820.

THE QUESTION.

I.

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.

II.

There grew pied wind-flowers and violets,

Daisies, those pearled Arcturi of the earth,

The constellated flower that never sets;

Faint oxlips; tender bluebells, at whose birth The sod scarce heaved; and that tall flower that wets (Like a child, half in tenderness and mirth)

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