LETTER TO MARIA GISBORNE.
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
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,
As Vulcan never wrought for Jove to clutch
Ixion or the Titan; or the quick
Wit of that man of God, Saint Dominic,
To convince atheist, Turk, or heretic ;
Or those in philanthropic 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, Sydney, Spenser, and the rest
Who made our land an island of the blessed,
(When lamp-like Spain, who now relumes her
On Freedom's hearth, grew dim with empire), With thumbscrews, wheels with tooth and spike and jag,
Which fishers 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
Magical forms the brick floor overspread. Proteus transformed to metal did not make More figures, or more strange; nor did he
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 catalogise in this verse of mine:
A pretty bowl of wood-not full of wine,
But quicksilver; that dew which the gromes
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, veinèd 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 perplexed
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 queer 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 lead 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.
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,
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