Imatges de pàgina
PDF
EPUB

Be their tomb who planned

To make it ours and thine!

Or with thine harmonising ardours fill

And raise thy sons, as o'er the prone horizon
Thy lamp feeds every twilight wave with fire!
Be man's high hope and unextinct desire
The instrument to work thy will divine !
Then clouds from sunbeams, antelopes from
leopards,

And frowns and fears from thee,
Would not more swiftly flee

Than Celtic wolves from the Ausonian shepherds.

Whatever, Spirit, from thy starry shrine
Thou yieldest or witholdest, oh let be
This city of thy worship ever free!
25th August 1820.

SUMMER AND WINTER.

It was a bright and cheerful afternoon,
Towards the end of the sunny month of June,
When the north wind congregates in crowds
The floating mountains of the silver clouds
From the horizon, and the stainless sky
Opens beyond them like eternity.

All things rejoiced beneath the sun,—the weeds,
The rivers, and the cornfields, and the reeds,

The willow leaves that glanced in the light

breeze,

And the firm foliage of the larger trees.

It was a Winter such as when birds die
In the deep forests; and the fishes lie
Stiffened in the translucent ice, which makes
Even the mud and slime of the warm lakes
A wrinkled clod as hard as brick; and when,
Among their children, comfortable men
Gather about great fires, and yet feel cold;
Alas then for the homeless beggar old!

LINES TO A REVIEWER.

ALAS! good friend, what profit can you see
In hating such a hateless thing as me?
There is no sport in hate, where all the rage
Is on one side. In vain would you assuage
Your frowns upon an unresisting smile,

In which not even contempt lurks, to beguile
Your heart by some faint sympathy of hate.
Oh! conquer what you cannot satiate :
For to your passion I am far more coy
Than ever yet was coldest maid or boy
In winter noon. Of your antipathy
If I am the Narcissus, you are free
To pine into a sound with hating me.

AUTUMN.

A DIRGE.

THE warm sun is failing, the bleak wind is wailing,

The bare boughs are sighing, the pale flowers are dying

And the Year

On the earth her death-bed, in a shroud of leaves

dead,

Is lying.

Come, Months, come away,
From November to May,

In your saddest array ;
Follow the bier

Of the dead cold Year,

And like dim shadows watch by her sepulchre.

The chill rain is falling, the nipped worm is crawling,

The rivers are swelling, the thunder is knelling For the Year;

The blithe swallows are flown, and the lizards

each gone

To his dwelling.

Come, Months, come away;
Put on white, black, and grey;
Let your light sisters play-

Ye, follow the bier

Of the dead cold Year,

And make her grave green with tear on tear.

LIBERTY.

I.

THE fiery mountains answer each other, Their thunderings are echoed from zone to zone ;

The tempestuous oceans awake one another, And the ice-rocks are shaken round Winter's throne,

When the clarion of the Typhoon is blown.

2.

From a single cloud the lightning flashes, Whilst a thousand isles are illumined around;

Earthquake is trampling one city to ashes, An hundred are shuddering and tottering, -the sound

Is bellowing underground.

3.

But keener thy gaze than the lightning's glare, And swifter thy step than the earthquake's

tramp;

Thou deafenest the rage of the ocean; thy stare Makes blind the volcanoes; the sun's bright lamp

To thine is a fen-fire damp.

4.

From billow and mountain and exhalation The sunlight is darted through vapour and blast;

From spirit to spirit, from nation to nation, From city to hamlet, thy dawning is cast,And tyrants and slaves are like shadows of night

In the van of the morning light.

THE TOWER OF FAMINE.

AMID the desolation of a city

Which was the cradle and is now the grave Of an extinguished people, so that Pity

Weeps o'er the shipwrecks of oblivion's wave, There stands the Tower of Famine. It is built Upon some prison-homes, whose dwellers rave For bread and gold and blood: Pain linked to Guilt,

Agitates the light flame of their hours, Until its vital oil is spent or spilt.

There stands the pile, a tower amid the towers

« AnteriorContinua »