O Spring! of hope and love and youth and gladness Wind-winged emblem: brightest, best, and fairest ! Whence comest thou, when, with dark Winter's sadness

The tears that fade in sunny smiles thou sharest ; Sister of joy, thou art the child who wearest Thy mother's dying smile, tender and sweet—

Thy mother Autumn, for whose grave thou bearest Fresh flowers, and beams like flowers, with gentle feet Disturbing not the leaves which are her winding-sheet. Revolt of Islam,

Canto ix.

SPRING.

'TWAS at the season when the Earth upsprings
From slumber, as a sphered angel's child,
Shadowing its eyes with green and golden wings,

Stands up before its mother bright and mild,
Of whose soft voice the air expectant seems—
So stood before the sun, which shone and smiled

To see it rise thus joyous from its dreams,
The fresh and radiant Earth. The hoary grove
Waxed green-and flowers burst forth like starry
beams;-

The grass in the warm sun did start and move,
And sea-buds burst beneath the waves serene :-
How many a one, though none be near to love,
Loves then the shade of his own soul, half seen
In any mirror-or the spring's young minions,
The winged leaves amid the copses green;—

How many a spirit then puts on the pinions
Of fancy, and outstrips the lagging blast,
And his own steps-and over wide dominions

Sweeps in his dream-drawn chariot, far and fast, More fleet than storms-the wide world shrinks below, When winter and despondency are past.

IT was the azure time of June

When the skies are deep in the stainless noon,
And the warm and fitful breezes shake
The fresh green leaves of the hedgerow briar,

And there were odours then to make

The very breath we did respire

A liquid element, whereon

Our spirits, like delighted things
That walk the air on subtle wings,
Floated and mingled far away,
Mid the warm winds of the sunny day.
And when the evening star came forth

Above the curve of the new-bent moon,
And light and sound ebbed from the earth,
Like the tide of the full and weary sea
To the depths of its own tranquillity,
Our natures to its own repose

Did the Earth's breathless sleep attune.
Rosalind and Helen.

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 river, and the corn-fields, 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!

1820.

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 nipt 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.

DIRGE FOR THE YEAR.

ORPHAN hours, the year is dead,
Come and sigh, come and weep!
Merry hours, smile instead,

For the year is but asleep.
See, it smiles as it is sleeping,
Mocking your untimely weeping.

As an earthquake rocks a corse
In its coffin in the clay,
So White Winter, that rough nurse,
Rocks the death-cold year to-day;
Solemn hours! wail aloud

For your mother in her shroud.

As the wild air stirs and sways

The tree-swung cradle of a child,

So the breath of these rude days

Rocks the year :—be calm and mild, Trembling hours, she will arise

With new love within her eyes.

January grey is here,

Like a sexton by her grave; February bears the bier,

March with grief doth howl and rave, And April weeps-but, O, ye hours, Follow with May's fairest flowers.