Which clanged alone the mountain's marble brow,
Warped into adamantine fretwork, hung
And filled with frozen light the chasm below.
Thou art the wine whose drunkenness is all
We can desire, O Love! and happy souls,
Ere from thy vine the leaves of autumn fall,
Catch thee, and feed from their o'erfiowing bowls
Thousands who thirst for thy ambrosial dew:-
Thou art the radiance which where ocean rolls .
Invests it; and when heavens are blue
Thou fillest them; and when the earth is fair
The shadow of thy moving wings imbue
Its deserts and its mountains, till they wear
Beauty like some bright robe;---thou ever soarest
Among the towers of men, and as soft air
In spring, which moves the unawakened forest,
Clothing with leaves its branches bare and bleak,
Thou floatest among men: and aye implorest
That which from thee they should implore:--the weak
Alone kneel to thee, offering up the hearts
The strong have broken--yet where shall any seek
What thou art we know not;
What is most like thee?
From rainbow clouds there flow not
Drops so bright to see,
As from thy presence showers a rain of
melody.
Like a poet hidden
In the light of thought,
Singing hymns unbidden,
Till the world is wrought
To sympathy with hopes and fears it
heeded not:
Like a high-born maiden
In a palace tower,
Soothing her love-laden
Soul in secret hour
With music sweet as love, which over-
flows her bower:
Like a glow-worm golden
In a deli of dew,
Scattering unbeholden
Its aerial hue
Among the flowers and grass, which
screen it from the view:
Like a rose embowered
In its own green leaves,
By warm winds deflowered,
Till the scent it gives
Makes faint with two much sweet these
heavy-winged thieves:
Sound of vernal showers
On the twinkling grass,
Rain-awakened flowers,
All that ever was
Joyous, and clear, and fresh, thy music
doth surpass:
Teach us, sprite or bird,
What sweet thoughts are thine:
I have never heard.
Praise of love or wine
That panted forth a flood of rapture
so divine.
But an empty vaunt,
A thing wherein we feel there is some
hidden want.
What objects are the fountains
Of thy happy strain ?
What fields, or waves, or mountains?
What shapes of sky plain? What love of thine own kind? what
ignorance of pain ?
With thy clear keen joyance
Languor cannot be:
Shadow of annoyance
Never came near thee:
Thou lovest; but ne'er knew love's sad
satiety.
Waking or asleep.
Thou of death must deem
Things more true and deep
Than we mortals dream,
Or how could thy notes fiow in such a
crystal stream ?
We look before and after,
And pine for what is not:
Our sincerest laughter
With some pain is fraught;
Our sweetest songs are those that te
of saddest thought.
Yet if we could scorn
Hate, and pride, and sear;
If we were things born
Not to shed a tear,
I know not how thy joy we ever shocłd
come near.
Better than all measures
Of delightful sound,
Better than all treasures
That in books are found,
Thy skill to poet were, thou scorer
of the ground!
Teach me half the gladness
That my brain must know,
Such harmonious madness
From my lips would flow,
The world should listen then, as I amı
listening now.
Chorus Hymenæal,
Or triumphal chaunt, Matched with thine would be all
LETTER TO MARIA GISBORNE.
Leghorn, July 1, 1820. 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 thoughtNo net of words in garish colours wrought To catch the idle buzzers of the dayBut 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 most remember me 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, such
As Vulcan never wrought for Jove to clutch
Ixion or the Titan:-or the quick
Wit of that man of God, St. Dominic,
To convince Atheist, Turk, or Heretic;
Or those in philosophic councils met,
Who thought to pay some interest for the debt
They owed
By giving a faint foretaste of damnation
To Shakspeare, Sidney, Spenser and the rest
Who made our land an island of the blest,
When lamp-like Spain, who now relumes her fire
On Freedom's hearth, grew dim with Empire:-
With thumbscrews, wheels, with tooth and spike and jag,
Which fishes 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 dread
Magical forins the brick floor overspread-
Proteus transformed to metal did not make
More figures, or more strange; nor did he take
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:
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