symbols

Like moonbeams that behind some piny mountain shower, 5

It visits with inconstant glance

Each human heart and countenance;

Like hues and harmonies of evening,

Like clouds in starlight widely spread,-
Like memory of music fled,

inadequate Like aught that for its grace may be
Dear, and yet dearer for its mystery.

petense Coleridge

II.

Spirit of BEAUTY, that dost consecrate

di

iff

With thine own hues all thou dost shine upon
Of human thought or form,

IO

where art thou gone?

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Why dost thou pass away and leave our state,
This dim vast vale of tears, vacant and desolate ?

Theme

of

Shelley

Ask why the sunlight not for ever

Weaves rainbows o'er yon mountain river,

Why aught should fail and fade that once is shown,
Why fear and dream and death and birth

Cast on the daylight of this earth

Such gloom, why man has such a scope
For love and hate, despondency and hope?

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III.

No voice from some sublimer world hath ever

To sage or poet these responses given — ·

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Therefore the names of Dæmon, Ghost, and Heaven,

Remain the records of their vain endeavour,

Frail spells-whose uttered charm might not avail to sever,

From all we hear and all we see,

Doubt, chance, and mutability.

Thy light alone-like mist o'er mountains driven,

Or music by the night wind sent,

Through strings of some still instrument,

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Or moonlight on a midnight stream, Gives grace and truth to life's unquiet dream.

IV.

Love, Hope, and Self-esteem, like clouds depart
And come, for some uncertain moments lent,
Man were immortal, and omnipotent,

Didst thou, unknown and awful as thou art,

No faith

orcharity

Keep with thy glorious train firm state within his heart.

Thou messenger of sympathies,

That wax and wane in lovers' eyes

Thou that to human thought art nourishment,

Like darkness to a dying flame!

Depart not as thy shadow came,

Depart not

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lest the grave should be,

Like life and fear, a dark reality. materialisin

V.

While yet a boy I sought for ghosts, and sped
Through many a listening chamber, cave and ruin,
And starlight wood, with fearful steps pursuing
Hopes of high talk with the departed dead.

I called on poisonous names with which our youth is fed,
I was not heard - I saw them not

When(musing deeply on the lot

Of life, at the sweet time when winds are wooing

All vital things that wake to bring
News of birds and blossoming, -
Sudden, thy shadow fell on me ;

I shrieked, and clasped my hands in ecstasy!

VI.

I vowed that I would dedicate my powers

50

baptism

To thee and thine — have I not kept the vow?
With beating heart and streaming eyes, even now

60

I call the phantoms of a thousand hours

Each from his voiceless grave: they have in visioned bowers 65
Of studious zeal or love's delight

Outwatched with me the envious night -
They know that never joy illumed my brow
Unlinked with hope that thou wouldst free
This world from its dark slavery, selfishness,
That thou O awful LOVELINESS, separateness
Wouldst give whate'er these words cannot express.

VII.

The day becomes more solemn and serene
When noon is past — there is a harmony
In autumn, and a lustre in its sky,

inat.

Which through the summer is not heard or seen,
As if it could not be, as if it had not been !
Thus let thy power, which like the truth
Of nature on my passive youth

Descended, to my onward life supply

Its calm to one who worships thee, And every form containing thee, Whom, SPIRIT fair, thy spells did bind To fear himself, and love all human kind. Summer, 1816.

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80

ON FANNY GODWIN.

HER voice did quiver as we parted,
Yet knew I not that heart was broken
From which it came, and I departed
Heeding not the words then spoken.
Misery — O Misery,

This world is all too wide for thee.

5

LINES.

I.

THAT time is dead for ever, child,
Drowned, frozen, dead for ever!

We look on the past

And stare aghast

At the spectres wailing, pale and ghast,
Of hopes which thou and I beguiled

To death on life's dark river.

II.

The stream we gazed on then, rolled by ;
Its waves are unreturning;

But we yet stand

In a lone land,

Like tombs to mark the memory

Of hopes and fears, which fade and flee.
In the light of life's dim morning.

November 5, 1817.

SONNET.

OZYMANDIAS.

I MET a traveller from an antique land

Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert.

Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, (stamped on these lifeless things,)
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed :

5

IO

5

And on the pedestal these words appear :
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

PASSAGE OF THE APENNINES.

LISTEN, listen, Mary mine,

To the whisper of the Apennine;

It bursts on the roof like the thunder's roar,

Or like the sea on a northern shore,

Heard in its raging ebb and flow

By the captives pent in the cave below.
The Apennine in the light of day

Is a mighty mountain dim and gray,

Which between the earth and sky doth lay;
But when night comes, a chaos dread

On the dim starlight then is spread,

And the Apennine walks abroad with the storm. May 4, 1818.

THE PAST.

I.

WILT thou forget the happy hours

Which we buried in Love's sweet bowers,

Heaping over their corpses cold

Blossoms and leaves instead of mould?

IO

5

IO