And many more, whose names on Earth are dark So long as fire outlives the parent spark, "It was for thee yon kingless sphere has long Silent alone amid a Heaven of Song. Assume thy wingèd throne, thou Vesper of our throng!" Who mourns for Adonais? oh come forth Fond wretch! and know thyself and him aright. Clasp with thy panting soul the pendulous Earth; As from a centre, dart thy spirit's light Beyond all worlds, until its spacious might Satiate the void circumference: then shrink Even to a point within our day and night; And keep thy heart light lest it make thee sink When hope has kindled hope, and lured thee to the brink. Or go to Rome, which is the sepulchre O, not of him, but of our joy: 'tis nought That ages, empires, and religions there Lie buried in the ravage they have wrought; For such as he can lend,-they borrow not Glory from those who made the world their prey ; And he is gathered to the kings of thought Who waged contention with their time's decay, And of the past are all that cannot pass away. Go thou to Rome,- -at once the Paradise, The grave, the city, and the wilderness; And where its wrecks like shattered mountains rise, And flowering weeds, and fragrant copses dress The bones of Desolation's nakedness Pass, till the Spirit of the spot shall lead Thy footsteps to a slope of green access Where, like an infant's smile, over the dead, A light of laughing flowers along the grass is spread. And gray walls moulder round, on which dull Time Like flame transformed to marble; and beneath, Have pitched in Heaven's smile their camp of death Welcoming him we lose with scarce extinguished breath. Here pause these graves are all too young as yet What Adonais is, why fear we to become? The One remains, the many change and pass; Until Death tramples it to fragments.—Die, If thou wouldst be with that which thou dost seek! Follow where all is fled !-Rome's azure sky, Flowers, ruins, statues, music, words, are weak The glory they transfuse with fitting truth to speak. Why linger, why turn back, why shrink, my Heart? No more let Life divide what Death can join together. That Light whose smile kindles the Universe, That Beauty in which all things work and move, That Benediction which the eclipsing Curse Of birth can quench not, that sustaining Love Which through the web of being blindly wove By man and beast and earth and air and sea, Burns bright or dim, as each are mirrors of The fire for which all thirst; now beams on me, Consuming the last clouds of cold mortality. The breath whose might I have invoked in song Whilst burning through the inmost veil of Heaven, Beacons from the abode where the Eternal are. 1821. ODE TO THE WEST WIND. I. O, WILD West Wind, thou breath of Autumn's being, Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red, The winged seeds, where they lie cold and low, Her clarion o'er the dreaming earth, and fill Wild Spirit, which art moving every where; II. Thou on whose stream, 'mid the steep sky's commotion Angels of rain and lightning: there are spread |