Like a glow-worm golden

In a dell of dew,

Scattering unbeholden

Its aërial hue

the tomb,

Thou lovest; but ne'er knew love's sad satiety.

Waking or asleep,

Thou of death must deem
Things more true and deep

Than we mortals dream,

Or how could thy notes flow in such a crystal stream?

We look before and after,

And pine for what is not:
Our sincerest laughter

With some pain is fraught;

Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest

thought.

Hate, and pride, and fear

Yet if we could scorn

If we were things born

Not to shed a tear,

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,

near.

Better than all measures

Of delightful sound,

Better than all treasures

That in books are found,

Thy skill to poet were, thou scorner of the ground!

Teach me half the gladness
That thy brain must know,
Such harmonious madness

From my lips would flow,

The world should listen then, as I am listening

now.

HYMN TO INTELLECTUAL

BEAUTY.

THE awful shadow of some unseen Power
Floats, though unseen, among us; visiting
This various world with as inconstant wing
As summer winds that creep from flower to flower;
Like moonbeams that behind some piny mountain
shower,

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,

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

Spirit of BEAUTY! that dost consecrate

With thine own hues all thou dost shine upon
Of human thought or form, where art thou
gone?

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

No voice from some sublimer world hath ever
To sage or poet these responses given:
Therefore the names of Demon, Ghost, and

· Heaven,

Remain the records of their vain endeavour:
Frail spells, whose utter'd 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,
Or moonlight on a midnight stream,
Gives grace and truth to life's unquiet dream.

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, lest the grave should be,
Like life and fear, a dark reality.

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 call'd 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 that 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 shriek'd, and clasp'd my hands in ecstasy!

I vow'd that I would dedicate my powers

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

now

I call the phantoms of a thousand hours Each from his voiceless grave: they have in vision'd bowers

Of studious zeal or love's delight Outwatch'd with me the envious night: They know that never joy illumined my brow, Unlink'd with hope that thou wouldst free This world from its dark slavery, That thou, O awful LOVELINESS, Wouldst give whate'er these words cannot

express.

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

MONT BLANC.

LINES WRITTEN IN THE VALE OF CHAMOUNI. I.

THE everlasting universe of things

Flows through the mind, and rolls its rapid waves, Now dark-now glittering-now reflecting gloom

Now lending splendour, where from secret springs
The source of human thought its tribute brings
Of waters, with a sound but half its own,
Such as a feeble brook will oft assume

In the wild woods, among the mountains lone,
Where waterfalls around it leap for ever,

river

Its subject mountains their unearthly forms
Pile around it, ice and rock; broad vales between
Of frozen floods, unfathomable deeps,

Blue as the overhanging heaven, that spread
And wind among the accumulated steeps;
A desert peopled by the storms alone,

Over its rocks ceaselessly bursts and raves.

II.

Thus thou, Ravine of Arve-dark, deep Ravine
Thou many-colour'd, many-voiced vale,
Over whose pines and crags and caverns sail
Fast clouds, shadows, and sunbeams: awful

scene,

Ghastly, and scarr'd, and riven.-Is this the scene Where the old Earthquake-demon taught her

young

Ruin? Were these their toys? or did a sea Of fire envelope once this silent snow? None can reply-all seems eternal now.

down

From the ice-gulfs that gird his secret throne, Bursting through these dark mountains, like the flame

Of lightning through the tempest; thou dost lie,
Thy giant brood of pines around thee clinging,
Children of elder time, in whose devotion

The chainless winds still come and ever came
To drink their odours, and their mighty swinging!
To hear an old and solemn harmony:
Thine earthly rainbows stretch'd across the sweep
Of the ethereal waterfall, whose veil
Robes some unsculptured image; the strange
sleep

Which, when the voices of the desert fail,
Wraps all in its own deep eternity;-
Thy caverns, echoing to the Arve's commotion
A loud lone sound, no other sound can tame:
Thou art pervaded with that ceaseless motion,
Thou art the path of that unresting sound-
Dizzy Ravine! and when I gaze on thee
I seem as in a trance sublime and strange
To muse on my own separate phantasy,
My own, my human mind, which passively
Now renders and receives fast influencings,
Holding an unremitting interchange
With the clear universe of things around;
One legion of wild thoughts, whose wandering
wings

Now float above thy darkness, and now rest
Where that or thou art no unbidden guest,
In the still cave of the witch Poesy,
Seeking among the shadows that pass by,
Ghosts of all things that are, some shade of thee,
Some phantom, some faint image; till the breast
From which they fled recalls them, thou art there!
III.

Some say that gleams of a remoter world
Visit the soul in sleep,-that death is slumber,
And that its shapes the busy thoughts outnumber
Of those who wake and live.-I look on high:
Has some unknown omnipotence unfurl'd
The veil of life and death? or do I lie

In dream, and does the mightier world of sleep
Spread far around and inaccessibly

Its circles? For the very spirit fails,

Which teaches awful doubt, or faith so mild,
So solemn, so serene, that man may be
But for such faith with nature reconciled:
Thou hast a voice, great Mountain, to repeal
Large codes of fraud and woe; not understood
By all, but which the wise, and great, and good
Interpret, or make felt, or deeply feel.

IV.

The fields, the lakes, the forests, and the streams,
Ocean, and all the living things that dwell
Within the dædal earth; lightning, and rain,
Earthquake, and fiery flood, and hurricane,
The torpor of the year when feeble dreams
Visit the hidden buds, or dreamless sleep
Holds every future leaf and flower;-the bound
With which from that detested trance they leap;
The works and ways of man, their death and

birth,

And that of him and all that his may be ;

All things that move and breathe with toil and

sound

Are born and die, revolve, subside, and swell.
Power dwells apart in its tranquillity,
Remote, serene, and inaccessible :

And this, the naked countenance of earth,
On which I gaze, even these primeval mountains,
Teach the adverting mind. The glaciers creep,
Like snakes that watch their prey, from their far
fountains,

Slow rolling on; there, many a precipice
Frost and the Sun in scorn of mortal power
Have piled-dome, pyramid, and pinnacle,
A city of death, distinct with many a tower
And wall impregnable of beaming ice.
Yet not a city, but a flood of ruin
Is there, that from the boundaries of the sky
Rolls its perpetual stream; vast pines are strewing
Its destined path, or in the mangled soil
Branchless and shatter'd stand; the rocks, drawn
down

From yon remotest waste, have overthrown
The limits of the dead and living world,
Never to be reclaim'd. The dwelling-place
Of insects, beasts, and birds becomes its spoil;
Their food and their retreat for ever gone,
So much of life and joy is lost. The race

That vanishes among the viewless gales!

Far, far above, piercing the infinite sky,

Which, from those secret chasms in tumult welling,

Meet in the vale, and one majestic River,

The breath and blood of distant lands, for ever Rolls its loud waters to the ocean waves, Breathes its swift vapours to the circling air.

V.

Mont Blanc yet gleams on high:-the power is there,

The still and solemn power of many sights

And many sounds, and much of life and death.
In the calm darkness of the moonless nights,
In the lone glare of day, the snows descend
Upon that Mountain; none beholds them there,
Nor when the flakes burn in the sinking sun,
Or the star-beams dart through them :-Winds
contend

Silently there, and heap the snow with breath
Rapid and strong, but silently! Its home
The voiceless lightning in these solitudes
Keeps innocently, and like vapour broods
Over the snow. The secret strength of things
Which governs thought, and to the infinite

dome

Of heaven is as a law, inhabits thee!

And what were thou, and earth, and stars, and

sea,

If to the human mind's imaginings

Silence and solitude were vacancy?

SWITZERLAND, June 23, 1816.

THE FUGITIVES.

I.

THE waters are flashing, The white hail is dashing, The lightnings are glancing, The hoar-spray is dancingAway!

The whirlwind is rolling,

The thunder is tolling,

The forest is swinging,
The minster-bells ringing-
Come away!

The Earth is like Ocean, Wreck-strewn and in motion: Bird, beast, man and worm Have crept out of the stormCome away!

II.

"Our boat has one sail,
And the helmsman is pale ;-
A bold pilot I trow,
Who should follow us now,"-
Shouted He-

And she cried: "Ply the oar!
Put off gaily from shore !"-
As she spoke, bolts of death
Mix'd with hail speck'd their path
O'er the sea.

And from isle, tower and rock, The blue beacon cloud broke, And though dumb in the blast, The red cannon flash'd fast From the lee.

III.

"And fear'st thou, and fear'st thou ?
And see'st thou, and hear'st thou ?
And drive we not free
O'er the terrible sea,

I and thou?"

One boat-cloak did cover
The loved and the lover-
Their blood beats one measure,
They murmur proud pleasure
Soft and low;-

While around the lash'd Ocean,
Like mountains in motion,
Is withdrawn and uplifted,
Sunk, shatter'd and shifted,
To and fro.

IV.

In the court of the fortress,
Beside the pale portress,

Like a blood-hound well beaten,
The bridegroom stands, eaten

By shame;

On the topmost watch-turret,
As a death-boding spirit,
Stands the gray tyrant father,
To his voice the mad weather
Seems tame;

And with curses as wild
As ere clung to child,

He devotes to the blast
The best, loveliest, and last
Of his name!

A LAMENT.

SWIFTER far than summer's flight,
Swifter far than youth's delight,
Swifter far than happy night,

Art thou come and gone:
As the earth when leaves are dead,
As the night when sleep is sped,
As the heart when joy is fled,
I am left lone, alone.

The swallow Summer comes again,
The owlet Night resumes her reign,
But the wild swan Youth is fain

To fly with thee, false as thou.
My heart each day desires the morrow,
Sleep itself is turn'd to sorrow,
Vainly would my winter borrow

Sunny leaves from any bough.

Lilies for a bridal bed,
Roses for a matron's head,
Violets for a maiden dead,