And, failing in thy power to bless,
But leav'st the heart a wilderness!
Idea which bindest life around
With music of so strange a sound
And beauty of so wild a birth,—
Farewell! for I have won the Earth!
When Hope, the eagle that tower'd, could see No cliff beyond him in the sky,
His pinions were bent droopingly,
And homeward turn'd his soften'd eye. 'Twas sunset: when the sun will part
There comes a sulienness of heart
To him who still would look upon
The glory of the suminer sun.
That soul will hate the ev'ning mist,
So often lovely, and will list
To the sound of the coming darkness (known
To those whose spirits harken) as one
Who, in a dream of night, would fly,
But can not, from a danger nigh
What though the moon the white moon--
Shed all the splendor of her noon,
Her smile is chilly, and her beam,
In that time of dreariness, will seem
(So like you gather in your breath)
A portrait taken after death.
And boyhood is a summer sun
Whose waning is the dreariest one.
For all we live to know is known,
And all we seek to keep hath flown:
Let life, then, as the day-flower, fall
With the noonday beauty,—which is all.
I reach'd my home-my home no more!
For all had flown who made it so.
I pass'd from out its mossy door,
And, though my tread was soft and low,
A voice came from the threshhold stone
Of one whom I had earlier known:
Oh, I defy thee, Hell, to show
On beds of fire that burn below,
A humbler heart-a deeper woe.
Father, I firmly do believe—
I know-for Death who comes for me
From regions of the blest afar,
Where there is nothing to deceive,
Hath left his iron gate ajar,
And rays of truth you can not see
Are flashing through Eternity,-
I do believe that Eblis hath
A snare in every human path:
Else how, when in the holy grove,
I wandered, of the idol, Love,
Who daily scents his snowy wings
With incense of burnt offerings
From the most unpolluted things,
Whose pleasant bowers are yet so riven
Above with trellis'd rays from Heaven,
-no tiniest fly-
The lightning of his eagle eye,--
How was it that Ambition crept,
Unseen, amid the revels there,
Till, growing bold, he laughed and leapt
In the tangles of Love's very hair?
Dim vales—and shadowy floods—
And cloudy-looking woods,
Whose forms we can't discover
For the tears that drip all over:
Huge moons there wax and wane,—
Again-again-again—
Every moment of the night,—
Forever changing places,
And they put out the starlight
With the breath from their pale faces. About twelve by the moon-dial,
One more filmy than the rest
Comes down-still down-and down
With its center on the crown
Of a mountain's eminence,
While its wide circumference
In easy drapery falls
Over hamlets, over halls,
Wherever they may be:
O'er the strange woods-o'er the sea—
Over spirits on the wing—
Over every drowsy thing—
And buries them up quite
In a labyrinth of light;
And then, how deep!-oh, deep
Is the passion of their sleep.
In the morning they arise,
And their moony covering
Is soaring in the skies,
With the tempests as they toss,
Like-almost anything-
Or a yellow albatross.
They use that moon no more
For the same end as before,-
Videlicet, a tent,
Which I think extravagant:
Its atomies, however,
Into a shower dissever,
Of which those butterflies
Of Earth who seek the skies,
And so come down again
(Never-contented things!)
Have brought a specimen
Upon their quivering wings.
|