Was even as bright and calm but transitory,—
And now thy hopes are gone, thy hair is hoary.
This most familiar scene, my pain,
These tombs,-alone remain.
1. THUS to be lost and thus to sink and die
Perchance were death indeed!-Constantia, turn!
In thy dark eyes a power like light doth lie,
Even though the sounds which were thy voice, which burn
Between thy lips, are laid to sleep;
Within thy breath, and on thy hair, like odour, it is yet,
And from thy touch like fire doth leap.
Even while I write, my burning cheeks are wet;
Alas that the torn heart can bleed but not forget!
2. A breathless awe, like the swift change
Unseen but felt in youthful slumbers,
Wild, sweet, but uncommunicably strange,
Thou breathest now in fast-ascending numbers.
The cope of heaven seems rent and cloven
By the enchantment of thy strain,
And on my shoulders wings are woven,
To follow its sublime career
Beyond the mighty moons that wane
Upon the verge of Nature's utmost sphere,
Till the world's shadowy walls are past and disappear.
3. Her voice is hovering o'er my soul-it lingers
O'ershadowing it with soft and lulling wings :
The blood and life within those snowy fingers
Teach witchcraft to the instrumental strings.
My brain is wild, my breath comes quick-
The blood is listening in my frame,
And thronging shadows, fast and thick,
Fall on my overflowing eyes;
My heart is quivering like a flame;
As morning dew that in the sunbeam dies,
I am dissolved in these consuming ecstasies.
4. I have no life, Constantia, now, but thee,
Whilst, like the world-surrounding air, thy song
Flows on, and fills all things with melody.
Now is thy voice a tempest swift and strong,
On which, like one in trance upborne,
Secure o'er rocks and waves I sweep,
Rejoicing like a cloud of morn:
Now 'tis the breath of summer night,
Which, when the starry waters sleep,
Round western isles with incense-blossoms bright Lingering, suspends my soul in its voluptuous flight.
SONNET.-OZYMANDIAS.
I MET a traveller from an antique land
Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!' Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare, The lone and level sands stretch far away."
TO THE LORD CHANCELLOR.
1. THY country's curse is on thee, darkest crest
Of that foul, knotted, many-headed worm
Which rends our Mother's bosom-priestly pest!
Masked resurrection of a buried form!
2. Thy country's curse is on thee! Justice sold,
Truth trampled, Nature's landmarks overthrown,
And heaps of fraud-accumulated gold,
Plead, loud as thunder, at Destruction's throne. 3. And, whilst that slow sure Angel which aye stands Watching the beck of Mutability
Delays to execute her high commands,
And, though a nation weeps, spares thine and thee;
4. Oh let a father's curse be on thy soul,
And let a daughter's hope be on thy tomb,
And both on thy grey head a leaden cowl
To weigh thee down to thine approaching doom!
5. I curse thee by a parent's outraged love;
By hopes long cherished and too lately lost;
By gentle feelings thou couldst never prove;
By griefs which thy stern nature never crossed;
6. By those infantine smiles of happy light
Which were within a stranger's hearth,
Quenched even when kindled, in untimely night
Hiding the promise of a lovely birth;
7. By those unpractised accents of young speech,
Which he who is a father thought to frame
To gentlest lore such as the wisest teach.
Thou strike the lyre of mind! Oh grief and shame!
8. By all the happy see in children's growth,
That undeveloped flower of budding years,
Sweetness and sadness interwoven both,
Source of the sweetest hopes and saddest fears:
9. By all the days, under a hireling's care,
Of dull constraint and bitter heaviness,-
Oh wretched ye if ever any were,
Sadder than orphans yet not fatherless !—
10. By the false cant which on their innocent lips
Must hang like poison on an opening bloom;
By the dark creeds which cover with eclipse
Their pathway from the cradle to the tomb;
II. By thy most impious hell, and all its terrors;
By all the grief, the madness, and the guilt
Of thine impostures, which must be their errors,
That sand on which thy crumbling power is built;
12. By thy complicity with lust and hate,
Thy thirst for tears, thy hunger after gold,
The ready frauds which ever on thee wait,
The servile arts in which thou hast grown old;
13. By thy most killing sneer, and by thy smile,
By all the acts and snares of thy black den,
And-for thou canst outweep the crocodile-
By thy false tears, those millstones braining men ;
14. By all the hate which checks a father's love;
By all the scorn which kills a father's care;
By those most impious hands that dared remove
Nature's high bounds; by thee; and by despair ;—
15. Yes, the despair which bids a father groan,
And cry, "My children are no longer mine;
The blood within those veins may be mine own,
But, tyrant, their polluted souls are thine !"-
16. I curse thee, though I hate thee not.
O slave!
If thou couldst quench the earth-consuming hell
Of which thou art a demon, on thy grave
This curse should be a blessing. Fare thee well!
TO WILLIAM SHELLEY.
I. THE billows on the beach are leaping around it;
The bark is weak and frail;
The sea looks black, and the clouds that bound it
Darkly strew the gale.
Come with me, thou delightful child,
Come with me! Though the wave is wild,
And the winds are loose, we must not stay,
Or the slaves of law may rend thee away.
2. They have taken thy brother and sister dear,
They have made them unfit for thee;
They have withered the smile and dried the tear
Which should have been sacred to me.
To a blighting faith and a cause of crime
They have bound them slaves in youthly time;
And they will curse my name and thee
Because we fearless are and free.
3. Come thou, beloved as thou art!
Another sleepeth still
Near thy sweet mother's anxious heart,
Which thou with joy wilt fill,
With fairest smiles of wonder thrown
On that which is indeed our own,
And which in distant lands will be
The dearest playmate unto thee.
4. Fear not the tyrants will rule for ever,
Or the priests of the evil faith;
They stand on the brink of that raging river
Whose waves they have tainted with death.
It is fed from the depth of a thousand dells,
Around them it foams and rages and swells;
And their swords and their sceptres I floating see,
Like wrecks, on the surge of eternity.
5. Rest, rest, shriek not, thou gentle child!
The rocking of the boat thou fearest,
And the cold spray and the clamour wild?
There! sit between us two, thou dearest,-
Me and thy mother. Well we know
The storm at which thou tremblest so,
With all its dark and hungry graves,
Less cruel than the savage slaves
Who hunt thee o'er these sheltering waves.
6. This hour will in thy memory
Be a dream of days forgotten;
We soon shall dwell by the azure sea
Of serene and golden Italy,
Or Greece the mother of the free.
And I will teach thine infant tongue
To call upon their heroes old
In their own language, and will mould
Thy growing spirit in the flame
Of Grecian lore; that by such name
A patriot's birthright thou mayst claim.
At the spectres, wailing, pale, and ghast,
Of hopes which thou and I beguiled
To death on life's dark river.
The stream we gazed on then rolled by;
Its waves are unreturning;
But we yet stand
In a lone land,
Like tombs to mark the memory
Of hopes and fears which fade and fly
In the light of life's dim morning.
ON FANNY GODWIN.
HER voice did quiver as we parted;
Yet knew. I not that heart was broken
From which it came, and I departed
Heeding not the words then spoken.
Misery-Ö Misery,
This world is all too wide for thee!
LINES TO A CRITIC.
1. HONEY from silkworms who can gather.
Or silk from the yellow bee?
The grass may grow in winter weather
As soon as hate in me.
2. Hate men who cant, and men who pray.
And men who rail, like thee;
An equal passion to repay
They are not coy like me.
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