Poems Read Online

I hear the pennons of her car

Self-moving, like cloud charioted by flame;

Comes she not, and come ye not,

Rulers of eternal thought,

To judge, with solemn truth, life's ill-apportioned lot?

Blind Love, and equal Justice, and the Fame

Of what has been, the Hope of what will be?

O Liberty! if such could be thy name

Wert thou disjoined from these, or they from thee:

If thine or theirs were treasures to be bought

By blood or tears, have not the wise and free

Wept tears, and blood like tears? – The solemn harmony

XIX

Paused, and the Spirit of that mighty singing

To its abyss was suddenly withdrawn;

Then, as a wild swan, when sublimely winging

Its path athwart the thunder-smoke of dawn,

Sinks headlong through the aëreal golden light

On the heavy-sounding plain,

When the bolt has pierced its brain;

As summer clouds dissolve, unburthened of their rain;

As a far taper fades with fading night,

As a brief insect dies with dying day, –

My song, its pinions disarrayed of might,

Drooped; o'er it closed the echoes far away

Of the great voice which did its flight sustain,

As waves which lately paved his watery way

Hiss round a drowner's head in their tempestuous play.

To ––

I

I fear thy kisses, gentle maiden,

Thou needest not fear mine;

My spirit is too deeply laden

Ever to burthen thine.

II

I fear thy mien, thy tones, thy motion,

Thou needest not fear mine;

Innocent is the heart's devotion

With which I worship thine.

Arethusa

I

Arethusa arose

From her couch of snows

In the Acroceraunian mountains, –

From cloud and from crag,

With many a jag,

Shepherding her bright fountains.

She leapt down the rocks,

With her rainbow locks

Streaming among the streams; –

Her steps paved with green

The downward ravine

Which slopes to the western gleams;

And gliding and springing

She went, ever singing,

In murmurs as soft as sleep;

The Earth seemed to love her,

And Heaven smiled above her,

As she lingered towards the deep.

II

Then Alpheus bold,

On his glacier cold,

With his trident the mountains strook;

And opened a chasm

In the rocks – with the spasm

All Erymanthus shook.

And the black south wind

It unsealed behind

The urns of the silent snow,

And earthquake and thunder

Did rend in sunder

The bars of the springs below.

And the beard and the hair

Of the River-god were

Seen through the torrent's sweep,

As he followed the light

Of the fleet nymph's flight

To the brink of the Dorian deep.

III

»Oh, save me! Oh, guide me!

And bid the deep hide me,

For he grasps me now by the hair!«

The loud Ocean heard,

To its blue depth stirred,

And divided at her prayer;

And under the water

The Earth's white daughter

Fled like a sunny beam;

Behind her descended

Her billows, unblended

With the brackish Dorian stream; –

Like a gloomy stain

On the emerald main

Alpheus rushed behind, –

As an eagle pursuing

A dove to its ruin

Down the streams of the cloudy wind.

IV

Under the bowers

Where the Ocean Powers

Sit on their pearled thrones;

Through the coral woods

Of the weltering floods,

Over heaps of unvalued stones;

Through the dim beams

Which amid the streams

Weave a network of coloured light;

And under the caves,

Where the shadowy waves

Are as green as the forest's night: –

Outspeeding the shark,

And the sword-fish dark,

Under the Ocean's foam,

And up through the rifts

Of the mountain clifts

They passed to their Dorian home.

V

And now from their fountains

In Enna's mountains,

Down one vale where the morning basks,

Like friends once parted

Grown single-hearted,

They ply their watery tasks.

At sunrise they leap

From their cradles steep

In the cave of the shelving hill;

At noontide they flow

Through the woods below

And the meadows of asphodel;

And at night they sleep

In the rocking deep

Beneath the Ortygian shore; –

Like spirits that lie

In the azure sky

When they love but live no more.

Song of Proserpine

While Gathering Flowers on the Plain of Enna

I

Sacred Goddess, Mother Earth,

Thou from whose immortal bosom

Gods, and men, and beasts have birth,

Leaf and blade, and bud and blossom,

Breathe thine influence most divine

On thine own child, Proserpine.

II

If with mists of evening dew

Thou dost nourish these young flowers

Till they grow, in scent and hue,

Fairest children of the Hours,

Breathe thine influence most divine

On thine own child, Proserpine.

Hymn of Apollo

I

The sleepless Hours who watch me as I lie,

Curtained with star-inwoven tapestries

From the broad moonlight of the sky,

Fanning the busy dreams from my dim eyes,

Waken me when their Mother, the gray Dawn,

Tells them that dreams and that the moon gone.

II

Then I arise, and climbing Heaven's blue dome,

I walk over the mountains and the waves,

Leaving my robe upon the ocean foam;

My footsteps pave the clouds with fire; the caves

Are filled with my bright presence, and the air

Leaves the green Earth to my embraces bare.

III

The sunbeams are my shafts, with which I kill

Deceit, that loves the night and fears the day;

All men who do or even imagine ill

Fly me, and from the glory of my ray

Good minds and open actions take new might,

Until diminished by the reign of Night.

IV

I feed the clouds, the rainbows and the flowers

With their aethereal colours; the moon's globe

And the pure stars in their eternal bowers

Are cinctured with my power as with a robe;

Whatever lamps on Earth or Heaven may shine

Are portions of one power, which is mine.

V

I stand at noon upon the peak of Heaven,

Then with unwilling steps I wander down

Into the clouds of the Atlantic even;

For grief that I depart they weep and frown:

What look is more delightful than the smile

With which I soothe them from the western isle?

VI

I am the eye with which the Universe

Beholds itself and knows itself divine;

All harmony of instrument or verse,

All prophecy, all medicine is mine,

All light of art or nature; – to my song

Victory and praise in its own right belong.

Hymn of Pan

I

From the forests and highlands

We come, we come;

From the river-girt islands,

Where loud waves are dumb

Listening to my sweet pipings.

The wind in the reeds and the rushes,

The bees on the bells of thyme,

The birds on the myrtle bushes,

The cicale above in the lime,

And the lizards below in the grass,

Were as silent as ever old Tmolus was,

Listening to my sweet pipings.

II

Liquid Peneus was flowing,

And all dark Tempe lay

In Pelion's shadow, outgrowing

The light of the dying day,

Speeded by my sweet pipings.

The Sileni, and Sylvans, and Fauns,

And the Nymphs of the woods and the waves,

To the edge of the moist river-lawns,

And the brink of the dewy caves,

And all that did then attend and follow,

Were silent with love, as you now, Apollo,

With envy of my sweet pipings.

III

I sang of the dancing stars,

I sang of the daedal Earth,

And of Heaven – and the giant wars,

And Love, and Death, and Birth, –

And then I changed my pipings, –

Singing how down the vale of Maenalus

I pursued a maiden and clasped a reed.

Gods and men, we are all deluded thus!

It breaks in our bosom and then we bleed:

All wept, as I think both ye now would,

If envy or age had not frozen your blood,

At the sorrow of my sweet pipings.

The Question

I

I dreamed that, as I wandered by the way,

Bare Winter suddenly was changed to Spring,

And gentle odours led my steps astray,

Mixed with a sound of waters murmuring

Along a shelving bank of turf, which lay

Under a copse, and hardly dared to fling

Its green arms round the bosom of the stream,

But kissed it and then fled, as thou mightest in dream.

II

There grew pied wind-flowers and violets,

Daisies, those pearled Arcturi of the earth,

The constellated flower that never sets;

Faint oxslips; tender bluebells, at whose birth

The sod scarce heaved; and that tall flower that wets –

Like a child, half in tenderness and mirth –

Its mother's face with Heaven's collected tears,

When the low wind, its playmate's voice, it hears.

III

And in the warm hedge grew lush eglantine,

Green cowbind and the moonlight-coloured may,

And cherry-blossoms, and white cups, whose wine

Was the bright dew, yet drained not by the day;

And wild roses, and ivy serpentine,

With its dark buds and leaves, wandering astray;

And flowers azure, black, and streaked with gold,

Fairer than any wakened eyes behold.

IV

And nearer to the river's trembling edge

There grew broad flag-flowers, purple pranked with white,

And starry river buds among the sedge,

And floating water-lilies, broad and bright,

Which lit the oak that overhung the hedge

With moonlight beams of their own watery light;

And bulrushes, and reeds of such deep green

As soothed the dazzled eye with sober sheen.

V

Methought that of these visionary flowers

I made a nosegay, bound in such a way

That the same hues, which in their natural bowers

Were mingled or opposed, the like array

Kept these imprisoned children of the Hours

Within my hand, – and then, elate and gay,

I hastened to the spot whence I had come,

That I might there present it! – Oh! to whom?

The Two Spirits: an Allegory

First Spirit.

O thou, who plumed with strong desire

Wouldst float above the earth, beware!

A Shadow tracks thy flight of fire –

Night is coming!

Bright are the regions of the air,

And among the winds and beams

It were delight to wander there –

Night is coming!

Second Spirit.

The deathless stars are bright above;

If I would cross the shade of night,

Within my heart is the lamp of love,

And that is day!

And the moon will smile with gentle light

On my golden plumes where'er they move;

The meteors will linger round my flight,

And make night day.

First Spirit.

But if the whirlwinds of darkness waken

Hail, and lightning, and stormy rain;

See, the bounds of the air are shaken –

Night is coming!

The red swift clouds of the hurricane

Yon declining sun have overtaken,

The clash of the hail sweeps over the plain –

Night is coming!

Second Spirit.

I see the light, and I hear the sound;

I'll sail on the flood of the tempest dark,

With the calm within and the light around

Which makes night day:

And thou, when the gloom is deep and stark,

Look from thy dull earth, slumber-bound,

My moon-like flight thou then mayst mark

On high, far away.

Some say there is a precipice

Where one vast pine is frozen to ruin

O'er piles of snow and chasms of ice

Mid Alpine mountains;

And that the languid storm pursuing

That winged shape, for ever flies

Round those hoar branches, aye renewing

Its aëry fountains.

Some say when nights are dry and clear,

And the death-dews sleep on the morass,

Sweet whispers are heard by the traveller,

Which make night day:

And a silver shape like his early love doth pass

Upborne by her wild and glittering hair,

And when he awakes on the fragrant grass,

He finds night day.

Ode to Naples17

Epode I a

I stood within the City disinterred18;

And heard the autumnal leaves like light footfalls

Of spirits passing through the streets; and heard

The Mountain's slumberous voice at intervals

Thrill through those roofless halls;

The oracular thunder penetrating shook

The listening soul in my suspended blood;

I felt that Earth out of her deep heart spoke –

I felt, but heard not: – through white columns glowed

The isle-sustaining ocean-flood,

A plane of light between two heavens of azure!

Around me gleamed many a bright sepulchre

Of whose pure beauty, Time, as if his pleasure

Were to spare Death, had never made erasure;

But every living lineament was clear

As in the sculptor's thought; and there

The wreaths of stony myrtle, ivy, and pine,

Like winter leaves o'ergrown by moulded snow,

Seemed only not to move and grow

Because the crystal silence of the air

Weighed on their life; even as the Power divine

Which then lulled all things, brooded upon mine.

Epode II a

Then gentle winds arose

With many a mingled close

Of wild Aeolian sound, and mountain-odours keen;

And where the Baian ocean

Welters with airlike motion,

Within, above, around its bowers of starry green,

Moving the sea-flowers in those purple caves,

Even as the ever stormless atmosphere

Floats o'er the Elysian realm,

It bore me, like an Angel, o'er the waves

Of sunlight, whose swift pinnace of dewy air

No storm can overwhelm.

I sailed, where ever flows

Under the calm Serene

A spirit of deep emotion

From the unknown graves

Of the dead Kings of Melody19.

Shadowy Aornos darkened o'er the helm

The horizontal aether; Heaven stripped bare

Its depth over Elysium, where the prow

Made the invisible water white as snow;

From that Typhaean mount, Inarime,

There streamed a sunbright vapour, like the standard

Of some aethereal host;

Whilst from all the coast,

Louder and louder, gathering round, there wandered

Over the oracular woods and divine sea

Prophesyings which grew articulate –

They seize me – I must speak them! – be they fate!

Strophe I

Naples! thou Heart of men which ever pantest

Naked, beneath the lidless eye of Heaven!

Elysian City, which to calm enchantest

The mutinous air and sea! they round thee, even

As sleep round Love, are driven!

Metropolis of a ruined Paradise

Long lost, late won, and yet but half regained!

Bright Altar of the bloodless sacrifice,

Which armed Victory offers up unstained

To Love, the flower-enchained!

Thou which wert once, and then didst cease to be,

Now art, and henceforth ever shalt be, free,

If Hope, and Truth, and Justice can avail, –

Hail, hail, all hail!

Strophe II

Thou youngest giant birth

Which from the groaning earth

Leap'st, clothed in armour of impenetrable scale!

Last of the Intercessors!

Who 'gainst the Crowned Transgressors

Pleadest before God's love! Arrayed in Wisdom's mail,

Wave thy lightning lance in mirth

Nor let thy high heart fail,

Though from their hundred gates the leagued Oppressors

With hurried legions move!

Hail, hail, all hail!

Antistrophe I a

What though Cimmerian Anarchs dare blaspheme

Freedom and thee? thy shield is as a mirror

To make their blind slaves see, and with fierce gleam

To turn his hungry sword upon the wearer;

A new Actaeon's error

Shall theirs have been – devoured by their own hounds!

Be thou like the imperial Basilisk

Killing thy foe with unapparent wounds!

Gaze on Oppression, till at that dread risk

Aghast she pass from the Earth's disk:

Fear not, but gaze – for freemen mightier grow,

And slaves more feeble, gazing on their foe: –

If Hope, and Truth, and Justice may avail,

Thou shalt be great – All hail!

Antistrophe II a

From Freedom's form divine,

From Nature's inmost shrine,

Strip every impious gawd, rend Error veil by veil;

O'er Ruin desolate,

O'er Falsehood's fallen state,

Sit thou sublime, unawed; be the Destroyer pale!

And equal laws be thine,

And winged words let sail,

Freighted with truth even from the throne of God:

That wealth, surviving fate,

Be thine. – All hail!

Antistrophe I b

Didst thou not start to hear Spain's thrilling paean

From land to land re-echoed solemnly,

Till silence became music? From the Aeaean20

To the cold Alps, eternal Italy

Starts to hear thine! The Sea

Which paves the desert streets of Venice laughs

In light and music; widowed Genoa wan

By moonlight spells ancestral epitaphs,

Murmuring, »Where is Doria?« fair Milan,

Within whose veins long ran

The viper's21 palsying venom, lifts her heel

To bruise his head. The signal and the seal

(If Hope and Truth and Justice can avail)

Art thou of all these hopes. – O hail!

Antistrophe II b

Florence! beneath the sun,

Of cities fairest one,

Blushes within her bower for Freedom's expectation:

From eyes of quenchless hope

Rome tears the priestly cope,

As ruling once by power, so now by admiration, –

An athlete stripped to run

From a remoter station

For the high prize lost on Philippi's shore: –

As then Hope, Truth, and Justice did avail,

So now may Fraud and Wrong! O hail!

Epode I b

Hear ye the march as of the Earth-born Forms

Arrayed against the ever-living Gods?

The crash and darkness of a thousand storms

Bursting their inaccessible abodes

Of crags and thunder-clouds?

See ye the banners blazoned to the day,

Inwrought with emblems of barbaric pride?

Dissonant threats kill Silence far away,

The serene Heaven which wraps our Eden wide

With iron light is dyed;

The Anarchs of the North lead forth their legions

Like Chaos o'er creation, uncreating;

An hundred tribes nourished on strange religions

And lawless slaveries, – down the aëreal regions

Of the white Alps, desolating,

Famished wolves that bide no waiting,

Blotting the glowing footsteps of old glory,

Trampling our columned cities into dust,

Their dull and savage lust

On Beauty's corse to sickness satiating –

They come! The fields they tread look black and hoary

With fire – from their red feet the streams run gory!

Epode II b

Great Spirit, deepest Love!

Which rulest and dost move

All things which live and are, within the Italian shore;

Who spreadest Heaven around it,

Whose woods, rocks, waves, surround it;

Who sittest in thy star, o'er Ocean's western floor;

Spirit of beauty! at whose soft command

The sunbeams and the showers distil its foison

From the Earth's bosom chill;

Oh, bid those beams be each a blinding brand

Of lightning! bid those showers be dews of poison!

Bid the Earth's plenty kill!

Bid thy bright Heaven above,

Whilst light and darkness bound it,

Be their tomb who planned

To make it ours and thine!

Or, with thine harmonizing ardours fill

And raise thy sons, as o'er the prone horizon

Thy lamp feeds every twilight wave with fire –

Be man's high hope and unextinct desire

The instrument to work thy will divine!

Then clouds from sunbeams, antelopes from leopards,

And frowns and fears from thee,

Would not more swiftly flee

Than Celtic wolves from the Ausonian shepherds. –

Whatever, Spirit, from thy starry shrine

Thou yieldest or withholdest, oh, let be

This city of thy worship ever free!

Autumn: A Dirge

I

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.

II

The chill rain is falling, the nipped 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 gray;

Let your light sisters play –

Ye, follow the bier

Of the dead cold Year,

And make her grave green with tear on tear.

The Waning Moon

And like a dying lady, lean and pale,

Who totters forth, wrapped in a gauzy veil,

Out of her chamber, led by the insane

And feeble wanderings of her fading brain,

The moon arose up in the murky East,

A white and shapeless mass –

To the Moon

I

Art thou pale for weariness

Of climbing heaven and gazing on the earth,

Wandering companionless

Among the stars that have a different birth, –

And ever changing, like a joyless eye

That finds no object worth its constancy?

II

Thou chosen sister of the Spirit,

That gazes on thee till in thee it pities ...

Death

I

Death is here and death is there,

Death is busy everywhere,

All around, within, beneath,

Above is death – and we are death.

II

Death has set his mark and seal

On all we are and all we feel,

On all we know and all we fear,

. . . . . .

III

First our pleasures die – and then

Our hopes, and then our fears – and when

These are dead, the debt is due,

Dust claims dust – and we die too.

IV

All things that we love and cherish,

Like ourselves must fade and perish;

Such is our rude mortal lot –

Love itself would, did they not.

Liberty

I

The fiery mountains answer each other;

Their thunderings are echoed from zone to zone;

The tempestuous oceans awake one another,

And the ice-rocks are shaken round Winter's throne,

When the clarion of the Typhoon is blown.

II

From a single cloud the lightening flashes,

Whilst a thousand isles are illumined around,

Earthquake is trampling one city to ashes,

An hundred are shuddering and tottering; the sound

Is bellowing underground.

III

But keener thy gaze than the lightening's glare,

And swifter thy step than the earthquake's tramp;

Thou deafenest the rage of the ocean; thy stare

Makes blind the volcanoes; the sun's bright lamp

To thine is a fen-fire damp.

IV

From billow and mountain and exhalation

The sunlight is darted through vapour and blast;

From spirit to spirit, from nation to nation,

From city to hamlet thy dawning is cast, –

And tyrants and slaves are like shadows of night

In the van of the morning light.

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!

The Tower of Famine

Amid the desolation of a city,

Which was the cradle, and is now the grave

Of an extinguished people, – so that Pity

Weeps o'er the shipwrecks of Oblivion's wave,

There stands the Tower of Famine. It is built

Upon some prison-homes, whose dwellers rave

For bread, and gold, and blood: Pain, linked to Guilt,

Agitates the light flame of their hours,

Until its vital oil is spent or spilt.

There stands the pile, a tower amid the towers

And sacred domes; each marble-ribbed roof,

The brazen-gated temples, and the bowers

Of solitary wealth, – the tempest-proof

Pavilions of the dark Italian air, –

Are by its presence dimmed – they stand aloof,

And are withdrawn – so that the world is bare;

As if a spectre wrapped in shapeless terror

Amid a company of ladies fair

Should glide and glow, till it became a mirror

Of all their beauty, and their hair and hue,

The life of their sweet eyes, with all its error,

Should be absorbed, till they to marble grew.

An Allegory

I

A portal as of shadowy adamant

Stands yawning on the highway of the life

Which we all tread, a cavern huge and gaunt;

Around it rages an unceasing strife

Of shadows, like the restless clouds that haunt

The gap of some cleft mountain, lifted high

Into the whirlwinds of the upper sky.

II

And many pass it by with careless tread,

Not knowing that a shadowy ...

Tracks every traveller even to where the dead

Wait peacefully for their companion new;

But others, by more curious humour led,

Pause to examine; – these are very few,

And they learn little there, except to know

That shadows follow them where'er they go.

The World's Wanderers

I

Tell me, thou Star, whose wings of light

Speed thee in thy fiery flight,

In what cavern of the night

Will thy pinions close now?

II

Tell me, Moon, thou pale and gray

Pilgrim of Heaven's homeless way,

In what depth of night or day

Seekest thou repose now?

III

Weary Wind, who wanderest

Like the world's rejected guest,

Hast thou still some secret nest

On the tree or billow?

Sonnet

Ye hasten to the grave! What seek ye there,

Ye restless thoughts and busy purposes

Of the idle brain, which the world's livery wear?

O thou quick heart, which pantest to possess

All that pale Expectation feigneth fair!

Thou vainly curious mind which wouldest guess

Whence thou didst come, and whither thou must go,

And all that never yet was known would know –

Oh, whither hasten ye, that thus ye press,

With such swift feet life's green and pleasant path,

Seeking, alike from happiness and woe,

A refuge in the cavern of gray death?

O heart, and mind, and thoughts! what thing do you

Hope to inherit in the grave below?

Lines to a Reviewer

Alas, good friend, what profit can you see

In hating such a hateless thing as me?

There is no sport in hate where all the rage

Is on one side: in vain would you assuage

Your frowns upon an unresisting smile,

In which not even contempt lurks to beguile

Your heart, by some faint sympathy of hate.

Oh, conquer what you cannot satiate!

For to your passion I am far more coy

Than ever yet was coldest maid or boy

In winter noon. Of your antipathy

If I am the Narcissus, you are free

To pine into a sound with hating me.

Fragment of a Satire on Satire

If gibbets, axes, confiscations, chains,

And racks of subtle torture, if the pains

Of shame, of fiery Hell's tempestuous wave,

Seen through the caverns of the shadowy grave,

Hurling the damned into the murky air

While the meek blest sit smiling; if Despair

And Hate, the rapid bloodhounds with which Terror

Hunts through the world the homeless steps of Error,

Are the true secrets of the commonweal

To make men wise and just; ...

And not the sophisms of revenge and fear,

Bloodier than is revenge ...

Then send the priests to every hearth and home

To preach the burning wrath which is to come,

In words like flakes of sulphur, such as thaw

The frozen tears ...

If Satire's scourge could wake the slumbering hounds

Of Conscience, or erase the deeper wounds,

The leprous scars of callous Infamy;

If it could make the present not to be,

Or charm the dark past never to have been,

Or turn regret to hope; who that has seen

What Southey is and was, would not exclaim,

»Lash on!« be the keen verse dipped in flame;

Follow his flight with winged words, and urge

The strokes of the inexorable scourge

Until the heart be naked, till his soul

See the contagion's spots foul;

And from the mirror of Truth's sunlike shield,

From which his Parthian arrow ...

Flash on his sight the spectres of the past,

Until his mind's eye paint thereon –

Let scorn like yawn below,

And rain on him like flakes of fiery snow.

This cannot be, it ought not, evil still –

Suffering makes suffering, ill must follow ill.

Rough words beget sad thoughts, and, beside,

Men take a sullen and a stupid pride

In being all they hate in others' shame,

By a perverse antipathy of fame.

'Tis not worth while to prove, as I could, how

From the sweet fountains of our Nature flow

These bitter-waters; I will only say,

If any friend would take Southey some day,

And tell him, in a country walk alone,

Softening harsh words with friendship's gentle tone,

How incorrect his public conduct is,

And what men think of it, 'twere not amiss.

Far better than to make innocent ink –

Good-Night

I

Good-Night? ah! no; the hour is ill

Which severs those it should unite;

Let us remain together still,

Then it will be good night.

II

How can I call the lone night good,

Though thy sweet wishes wing its flight?

Be it not said, thought, understood –

Then it will be – good night.

III

To hearts which near each other move

From evening close to morning light,

The night is good; because, my love,

They never say good-night.

Buona Notte

I

»Buona notte, buona notte!« – Come mai

La notte sarà buona senza te?

Non dirmi buona notte, – che tu sai,

La notte sà star buona da per se.

II

Solinga, scura, cupa, senza speme,

La notte quando Lilla m'abbandona;

Pei cuori chi si batton insieme

Ogni notte, senza dirla, sarà buona.

III

Come male buona notte si suona

Con sospiri e parole interrotte! –

Il modo di aver la notte buona

E mai non di dir la buona notte.

Orpheus

A. Not far from hence. From yonder pointed hill,

Crowned with a ring of oaks, you may behold

A dark and barren field, through which there flows,

Sluggish and black, a deep but narrow stream,

Which the wind ripples not, and the fair moon

Gazes in vain, and finds no mirror there.

Follow the herbless banks of that strange brook

Until you pause beside a darksome pond,

The fountain of this rivulet, whose gush

Cannot be seen, hid by a rayless night

That lives beneath the overhanging rock

That shades the pool – an endless spring of gloom,

Upon whose edge hovers the tender light,

Trembling to mingle with its paramour, –

But, as Syrinx fled Pan, so night flies day,

Or, with most sullen and regardless hate,

Refuses stern her heaven-born embrace.

On one side of this jagged and shapeless hill

There is a cave, from which there eddies up

A pale mist, like aëreal gossamer,

Whose breath destroys all life – awhile it veils

The rock – then, scattered by the wind, it flies

Along the stream, or lingers on the clefts,

Killing the sleepy worms, if aught bide there.

Upon the beetling edge of that dark rock

There stands a group of cypresses; not such

As, with a graceful spire and stirring life,

Pierce the pure heaven of your native vale,

Whose branches the air plays among, but not

Disturbs, fearing to spoil their solemn grace;

But blasted and all wearily they stand,

One to another clinging; their weak boughs

Sigh as the wind buffets them, and they shake

Beneath its blasts – a weatherbeaten crew!

Chorus. What wondrous sound is that, mournful and faint,

But more melodious than the murmuring wind

Which through the columns of a temple glides?

A. It is the wandering voice of Orpheus' lyre,

Borne by the winds, who sigh that their rude king

Hurries them fast from these air-feeding notes;

But in their speed they bear along with them

The waning sound, scattering it like dew

Upon the startled sense.

Chorus. Does he still sing?

Methought he rashly cast away his harp

When he had lost Eurydice.

A. Ah, no!

Awhile he paused. As a poor hunted stag

A moment shudders on the fearful brink

Of a swift stream – the cruel hounds press on

With deafening yell, the arrows glance and wound, –

He plunges in: so Orpheus, seized and torn

By the sharp fangs of an insatiate grief,

Maenad-like waved his lyre in the bright air,

And wildly shrieked »Where she is, it is dark!«

And then he struck from forth the strings a sound

Of deep and fearful melody. Alas!

In times long past, when fair Eurydice

With her bright eyes sat listening by his side,

He gently sang of high and heavenly themes.

As in a brook, fretted with little waves

By the light airs of spring – each riplet makes

A many-sided mirror for the sun,

While it flows musically through green banks,

Ceaseless and pauseless, ever clear and fresh,

So flowed his song, reflecting the deep joy

And tender love that fed those sweetest notes,

The heavenly offspring of ambrosial food.

But that is past. Returning from drear Hell,

He chose a lonely seat of unhewn stone,

Blackened with lichens, on a herbless plain.

Then from the deep and overflowing spring

Of his eternal ever-moving grief

There rose to Heaven a sound of angry song.

'Tis as a mighty cataract that parts

Two sister rocks with waters swift and strong,

And casts itself with horrid roar and din

Adown a steep; from a perennial source

It ever flows and falls, and breaks the air

With loud and fierce, but most harmonious roar,

And as it falls casts up a vaporous spray

Which the sun clothes in hues of Iris light.

Thus the tempestuous torrent of his grief

Is clothed in sweetest sounds and varying words

Of poesy. Unlike all human works,

It never slackens, and through every change

Wisdom and beauty and the power divine

Of mighty poesy together dwell,

Mingling in sweet accord. As I have seen

A fierce south blast tear through the darkened sky,

Driving along a rack of winged clouds,

Which may not pause, but ever hurry on,

As their wild shepherd wills them, while the stars,

Twinkling and dim, peep from between the plumes.

Anon the sky is cleared, and the high dome

Of serene Heaven, starred with fiery flowers,

Shuts in the shaken earth; or the still moon

Swiftly, yet gracefully, begins her walk,

Rising all bright behind the eastern hills.

I talk of moon, and wind, and stars, and not

Of song; but, would I echo his high song,

Nature must lend me words ne'er used before,

Or I must borrow from her perfect works,

To picture forth his perfect attributes.

He does no longer sit upon his throne

Of rock upon a desert herbless plain,

For the evergreen and knotted ilexes,

And cypresses that seldom wave their boughs,

And sea-green olives with their grateful fruit,

And elms dragging along the twisted vines,

Which drop their berries as they follow fast,

And blackthorn bushes with their infant race

Of blushing rose-blooms; beeches, to lovers dear,

And weeping willow trees; all swift or slow,

As their huge boughs or lighter dress permit,

Have circled in his throne, and Earth herself

Has sent from her maternal breast a growth

Of starlike flowers and herbs of odour sweet,

To pave the temple that his poesy

Has framed, while near his feet grim lions couch,

And kids, fearless from love, creep near his lair.

Even the blind worms seem to feel the sound.

The birds are silent, hanging down their heads,

Perched on the lowest branches of the trees;

Not even the nightingale intrudes a note

In rivalry, but all entranced she listens.

Fiordispina

The season was the childhood of sweet June,

Whose sunny hours from morning until noon

Went creeping through the day with silent feet,

Each with its load of pleasure; slow yet sweet;

Like the long years of blest Eternity

Never to be developed. Joy to thee,

Fiordispina and thy Cosimo,

For thou the wonders of the depth canst know

Of this unfathomable flood of hours,

Sparkling beneath the heaven which embowers –

They were two cousins, almost like to twins,

Except that from the catalogue of sins

Nature had rased their love – which could not be

But by dissevering their nativity.

And so they grew together like two flowers

Upon one stem, which the same beams and showers

Lull or awaken in their purple prime,

Which the same hand will gather – the same clime

Shake with decay. This fair day smiles to see

All those who love – and who e'er loved like thee,

Fiordispina? Scarcely Cosimo,

Within whose bosom and whose brain now glow

The ardours of a vision which obscure

The very idol of its portraiture.

He faints, dissolved into a sea of love;

But thou art as a planet sphered above;

But thou art Love itself – ruling the motion

Of his subjected spirit: such emotion

Must end in sin and sorrow, if sweet May

Had not brought forth this morn – your wedding-day.

. . . .