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 spherèd 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!

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.

When one, like them, but mightier far than they, The Anarch of thine own bewildered powers Rose armies mingled in obscure array,

Like clouds with clouds, darkening the sacred
bowers

Of serene heaven. He, by the past pursued,
Rests with those dead, but unforgotten hours,
Whose ghosts scare victor kings in their ancestral

towers.

England yet sleeps: was she not called of old? Spain calls her now, as with its thrilling thunder Vesuvius wakens Ætna, and the cold

Snow-crags by its reply are cloven in sunder: O'er the lit waves every Æolian isle

From Pithecusa to Pelorus

Howls, and leaps, and glares in chorus: They cry, Be dim; ye lamps of heaven suspended o'er us.

Her chains are threads of gold, she need but smile And they dissolve; but Spain's were links of steel, Till bit to dust by virtue's keenest file.

Twins of a single destiny! appeal

To the eternal years enthroned before us,

In the dim West; impress us from a seal,

All ye have thought and done! Time cannot dare conceal.

Tomb of Arminius! render up thy dead,

Till, like a standard from a watch-tower's staff,
His soul may stream over the tyrant's head;
Thy victory shall be his epitaph,

Wild Bacchanal of truth's mysterious wine,