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TO A SKYLARK.

All the earth and air
With thy voice is loud,
As, when night is bare,

From one lone.y cloud

The moon rains out her beams, and heaven is overflowed.

What thou art we know not;

What is most like thee?

From rainbow clouds there flow not

Drops so bright to see,

As from thy presence showers a rain of melody.

Like a poet hidden

In the light of thought,
Singing hymns unbidden,

Till the world is wrought

To sympathy with hopes and fears it heeded not:

Like a highborn maiden.

In a palace tower,
Soothing her love-laden

Soul in secret hour

With music sweet as love, which overflows her bower;

Like a glowworm golden

In a dell of dew,
Scattering unbeholden

Its aerial hue

Among the flowers and grass which screen it from

the view;

Like a rose embowered

In its own green leaves,
By warm winds deflowered,

Till the scent it gives

Makes faint with too much sweet those heavy-winged

thieves.

TO A SKYLARK.

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Sound of vernal showers

On the twinkling grass,-
Rain-awakened flowers,

All that ever was

Joyous, and clear, and fresh, thy music doth surpass

Teach us, sprite or bird,

What sweet thoughts are thine;

I have never heard

Praise of love or wine

That panted forth a flood of rapture so divine.

Chorus hymeneal,

Or triumphant chant,

Matched with thine, would be all

But an empty vaunt,

A thing wherein we feel there is some hidden want.

What objects are the fountains

Of thy happy strain?

What fields, or waves, or mountains?

What shapes of sky or plain?

What love of thine own kind? What ignorance of pain?

With thy clear, keen joyance

Languor cannot be :

Shadow of annoyance

Never came near thee:

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 ;

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THE PRISONER OF CHILLON.

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.

Yet if we could scorn

Hate, and pride, and fear;

If we were things born

Not to shed a tear,

I know not how thy joy we ever should come 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

THE PRISONER OF CHILLON. - Byron.

A FABLE.

SONNET ON CHILLON.

ETERNAL spirit of the chainless mind!
Brightest in dungeons, Liberty, thou art!
For there thy habitation is the heart,-

THE PRISONER OF CHILLON.

The heart which love of thee alone can bind And when thy sons to fetters are consigned,

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To fetters, and the damp vault's dayless gloom, Their country conquers with their martyrdom, And Freedom's fame finds wings on every wind. Chillon thy prison is a holy place,

And thy sad floor an altar, for 't was trod, Until his very steps have left a trace Worn, as if thy cold pavement were a sod, By Bonnivard!— May none those marks efface: For they appeal from tyranny to God.

I.

My hair is gray, but not with years;
Nor grew it white

In a single night,

As men's have grown from sudden fears :
My limbs are bowed, though not with toil,
But rusted with a vile repose;

For they have been a dungeon's spoil,
And mine has been the fate of those
To whom the goodly earth and air
Are banned and barred, forbidden fare :
But this was for my father's faith
I suffered chains and courted death
That father perished at the stake
For tenets he would not forsake
And for the same his lineal race
In darkness found a dwelling-place;
We were seven, who now are one,

Six in youth, and one in age,
Finished as they had begun,

Proud of Persecution's rage;
One in fire, and two in field,
Their belief with blood have sealed,

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THE PRISONER OF CHILLON.

Dying as their father died,

For the God their foes denied ;
Three were in a dungeon cast,

Of whom this wreck is left the last.

II.

There are seven pillars of Gothic morid
In Chillon's dungeons deep and old,
There are seven columns, massy and guy,
Dim with a dull imprisoned ray,

A sunbeam which hath lost its way,
And through the crevice and the cleft
Of the thick wal. is fallen and left,
Creeping o'er the floor so damp,
Like a marsh's meteor lamp :
And in each pillar there is a ring,

And in each ring there is a chain;
That iron is a cankering thing,

For in these limbs its teeth remain,
With marks that will not wear away,
Till I have done with this new day,
Which now is painful to these eyes,
Which have not seen the sun so rise
For years, I cannot count them o’er,
I lost their long and heavy score
When my last brother drooped and died,
And I lay living by his side.

III.

They chained us each to a column stone,
And we were three, yet each alone :
We could not move a single pace,
We could not see each other's face,
But with that pale and livid light
That made us strangers in our sight.