LOVE, HOPE, DESIRE, AND FEAR AND many there were hurt by that strong boy; His name, they said, was Pleasure. And near him stood, glorious beyond measure, Four Ladies who possess all empery In earth and air and sea; Nothing that lives from their award is free. Love, Hope, Desire, and Fear ; And they the regents are Of the four elements that frame the heart, And each diversely exercised her art By force or circumstance or sleight Desire presented her [false] glass, and then Was spellbound to embrace what seemed so fair And, dazed by that bright error, It would have scorned the [shafts] of the avenger, And death, and penitence, and danger, Had not then silent Fear Touched with her palsying spear, So that, as if a frozen torrent, The blood was curdled in its current; It dared not speak, even in look or motion, Love, Hope, Desire, and Fear. Published by Garnett, 1862, and dated, 1821. Between Desire and Fear thou wert A wretched thing, poor Heart! Sad was his life who bore thee in his breast, Wild bird for that weak nest. Till Love even from fierce Desire it bought, At one birth these four were born The fair hand that wounded it, A SATIRE ON SATIRE IF gibbets, axes, confiscations, chains, Are the true secrets of the commonweal To make men wise and just; . . . And not the sophisms of revenge and fear, Bloodier than is revenge Then send the priests to every hearth and home To preach the burning wrath which is to come, In words like flakes of sulphur, such as thaw The frozen tears If Satire's scourge could wake the slumbering hounds Of Conscience, or erase the deeper wounds, The leprous scars of callous infamy ; If it could make the present not to be, A Satire on Satire. Published by Dowden, Correspondence of Robert Southey and Caroline Bowles, 1880, and dated, 1820. The strokes of the inexorable scourge Until the heart be naked, till his soul See the contagion's spots foul; And from the mirror of Truth's sunlike shield, Flash on his sight the spectres of the past, Let scorn like yawn below, And rain on him like flakes of fiery snow. Men take a sullen and a stupid pride In being all they hate in others' shame, and, beside, 'Tis not worth while to prove, as I could, how If any friend would take Southey some day, Softening harsh words with friendship's gentle tone, How incorrect his public conduct is, And what men think of it, 'twere not amiss. Far better than to make innocent ink GINEVRA WILD, pale, and wonder-stricken, even as one Who staggers forth into the air and sun From the dark chamber of a mortal fever, Bewildered, and incapable, and ever Ginevra. Published by Mrs. Shelley, 1824, and dated, Pisa, 1821. Fancying strange comments in her dizzy brain Of objects and of persons passed like things The vows to which her lips had sworn assent And so she moved under the bridal veil, Was less heavenly fair- her face was bowed, The bride-maidens who round her thronging came, Some with a sense of self-rebuke and shame, Envying the unenviable; and others Making the joy which should have been another's Their own by gentle sympathy; and some Sighing to think of a unhappy home; 22 was less || were less, Rossetti. |