A London All this is beautiful in every land. view and 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 that 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, 280 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 the 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! 291
Next winter you must pass with me; I'll
My house by that time turned into a grave
Of dead despondence and low-thoughted care, Next And all the dreams which our tormentors are; Oh! that Hunt, Hogg, Peacock and Smith 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, Which is not his fault, as you may divine. 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 philosophize! 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
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 despite of God 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."
HER OBJECTING TO THE FOLLOWING POEM,
UPON THE SCORE OF ITS CONTAINING
Plea for
a visionary rhyme
How, my dear Mary, are you critic-bitten, (For vipers kill, though dead,) by some review,
That you condemn these verses I have written, Because they tell no story, false or true! What, though no mice are caught by a young kitten,
May it not leap and play as grown cats do, Till its claws come? Prithee, for this one time, Content thee with a visionary rhyme.
What hand would crush the silken-winged fly, The youngest of inconstant April's minions, Because it cannot climb the purest sky,
Where the swan sings, amid the sun's dominions?
Not thine. Thou knowest 'tis its doom to die, When day shall hide within her twilight pinions
The lucent eyes and the eternal smile,
Serene as thine, which lent it life awhile.
To thy fair feet a winged Vision came, Whose date should have been longer than a day, And o'er thy head did beat its wings for fame, And in thy sight its fading plumes display; The watery bow burned in the evening flame, But the shower fell, the swift sun went his way-
And that is dead.- -O, let me not believe That any thing of mine is fit to live!
Wordsworth informs us he was nineteen years Considering and retouching Peter Bell; Watering his laurels with the killing tears
Of slow, dull care, so that their roots to hell Might pierce, and their wide branches blot the spheres
Of heaven, with dewy leaves and flowers; this well
May be, for Heaven and Earth conspire to foil The over-busy gardener's blundering toil.
My Witch indeed is not so sweet a creature As Ruth or Lucy, whom his graceful praise Clothes for our grandsons—but she matches Peter, Though he took nineteen years, and she three days
In dressing. Light the vest of flowing metre She wears; he, proud as dandy with his stays, Has hung upon his wiry limbs a dress Like King Lear's "looped and windowed raggedness."
"Laon and Cythna" and
"Peter
Bell"
Her birth If you strip Peter, you will see a fellow, Scorched by Hell's hyperequatorial climate Into a kind of a sulphureous yellow :
A lean mark, hardly fit to fling a rhyme at; In shape a Scaramouch, in hue Othello.
If you unveil my Witch, no priest nor primate Can shrive you of that sin,—if sin there be In love, when it becomes idolatry.
BEFORE those cruel Twins, whom at one birth Incestuous Change bore to her father Time, Error and Truth, had hunted from the Earth All those bright natures which adorned its prime,
And left us nothing to believe in, worth
The pains of putting into learnèd rhyme, A lady-witch there lived on Atlas' mountain Within a cavern, by a secret fountain.
Her mother was one of the Atlantides: The all-beholding Sun had ne'er beholden In his wide voyage o'er continents and seas, So fair a creature, as she lay enfolden
In the warm shadow of her loveliness ;
He kissed her with his beams, and made all golden
The chamber of grey rock in which she lay— She, in that dream of joy, dissolved away.
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