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Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain

To thy high requiem become a sod.

60 Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird! No hungry generations tread thee down; The voice I hear this passing night was heard In ancient days by emperor and clown: Perhaps the self-same song that found a path Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home,

She stood in tears amid the alien corn;5 The same that oft-times hath Charmed magic casements, opening on the foam

Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn, 70

Forlorn! the very word is like a bell

To toll me back from thee to my sole self! Adieu! the fancy cannot cheat so well

As she is famed to do, deceiving elf.
Adieu! adieu! thy plaintive anthem fades
Past the near meadows, over the still stream,
Up the hill-side; and now 'tis buried deep
In the next valley-glades:

Was it a vision, or a waking dream?
Fled is that music:-Do I wake or sleep?

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Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not

leave

Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare; Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss, Though winning near the goal-yet, do not grieve;

She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,

For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!

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To what green altar, O mysterious priest, Lead'st thou that heifer lowing at the skies, And all her silken flanks with garlands dressed?

What little town by river or sea shore,
Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel,

Is emptied of this folk, this pious morn?

1 historian of sylvan scenes "There is some reason for thinking that the particular urn which inspired this beautiful poem is a somewhat weather-beaten work in marble still preserved in the garden of Holland House, and figured in Piranesi's Vasi e Candelabri." -H. B. Forman.

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Much have I travelled in the realms of gold,
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
Round many western islands have I been
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told
That deep-browed Homer ruled as his demesne;
Yet did I never breathe its pure serene
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He stared at the Pacific-and all his men
Looked at each other with a wild surmise-
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

ON THE GRASSHOPPER AND CRICKET†

The poetry of earth is never dead:
When all the birds are faint with the hot sun,
And hide in cooling trees, a voice will run
From hedge to hedge about the new-mown
mead;

That is the Grasshopper's-he takes the lead
In summer luxury, he has never done

With his delights; for when tired out with fun He rests at ease beneath some pleasant weed. The poetry of earth is ceasing never:

On a lone winter evening, when the frost Has wrought a silence, from the stove there

shrills

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ON SEEING THE ELGIN MARBLES‡
My spirit is too weak-mortality
Weighs heavily on me like unwilling sleep,
And each imagined pinnacle and steep
Of godlike hardship tells me I must die
Like a sick Eagle looking at the sky.
Yet 'tis a gentle luxury to weep

That I have not the cloudy winds to keep,
Fresh for the opening of the morning's eye.
Such dim-conceived glories of the brain
Bring round the heart an undescribable feud;
So do these wonders a most dizzy pain,
That mingles Grecian grandeur with the rude
Wasting of old Time-with a billowy main-
A sun-a shadow of a magnitude.

ON THE SEA

It keeps eternal whisperings around
Gluts twice ten thousand caverns, till the spell
Desolate shores, and with its mighty swell
Of Hecate leaves them their old shadowy
sound.

Often 'tis in such gentle temper found,
That scarcely will the very smallest shell
Be moved for days from where it sometime
fell,

When last the winds of heaven were unbound. Oh ye! who have your eye-balls vexed and tired,

Feast them upon the wideness of the Sea;
Oh ye! whose ears are dinned with uproar
rude,

Or fed too much with cloying melody—
Sit ye near some old cavern's mouth, and brood
Until ye start, as if the sea-nymphs quired!

WHEN I HAVE FEARS THAT I MAY CEASE TO BE

When I have fears that I may cease to be
Before my pen has gleaned my teeming brain,
Before high-pilèd books, in charactery,

Hold like rich garners the full ripened grain;
Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,
When I behold, upon the night's starred face,
And think that I may never live to trace
Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance;
And when I feel, fair creature of an hour!
That I shall never look upon thee more,
Never have relish in the faery power
Of unreflecting love!-then on the shore
Of the wide world I stand alone, and think
Till Love and Fame to nothingness do sink.

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BRIGHT STAR! WOULD I WERE STED- | And then the old man shook his head,
FAST AS THOU ART*

Bright star! would I were stedfast as thou

art

Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night,
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
Like Nature's patient, sleepless Eremite,
The moving waters at their priestlike task
Of pure ablution round earth's human shores,
Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask
Of snow upon the mountains and the moors-
No-yet still stedfast, still unchangeable,
Pillowed upon my fair love's ripening breast,
To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,
Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live ever-or else swoon to death.

LATE GEORGIAN BALLADS AND

LYRICS

ROBERT SOUTHEY (1774-1843)

THE BATTLE OF BLENHEIM‡

It was a summer evening;
Old Kaspar's work was done,
And he before his cottage door

Was sitting in the sun;
And by him sported on the green
His little grandchild Wilhelmine.

She saw her brother Peterkin

Roll something large and round, Which he beside the rivulet

In playing there had found.

He came to ask what he had found,
That was so large, and smooth, and round.

Old Kaspar took it from the boy,
Who stood expectant by;

And with a natural sigh,

"Tis some poor fellow's skull," said he, "Who fell in the great victory.

18

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But things like that, you know, must be
After a famous victory.

This sonnet was composed on the Dorsetshire
coast just as Keats was sailing for Italy the
autumn before his death. It was written in
a copy of Shakespeare's poems on a blank page
facing A Lover's Complaint.
Under this general title are given here some
minor poems of the early decades of the nine-
teenth century, though one or two are really
post-Georgian. Hunt's Abou ben Adhem, forWhy, 'twas a very wicked thing!''
instance, is as late as 1844: but Hunt was
himself a contemporary of Shelley and Keats.
The poems have been selected partly for their

"Great praise the Duke of Marlboro' won,
And our good Prince Eugene."

66

Said little Wilhelmine.

54

'Nay, nay, my little girl,

quoth he;

60

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real value as shown by their continued popuIt was a famous victory. larity, and partly to illustrate the character and range of the minor verse of the period. At Blenheim, in Bavaria, in 1704, the British and their German allies, under the Duke of Marlborough and the Austrian Prince Eugene, defeated the French and Bavarians with great loss.

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