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.
Their names will I declare to thee,

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
To prove her dreadful might
Upon that poor domain.

Desire presented her [false] glass, and then
The spirit dwelling there

Was spellbound to embrace what seemed so fair
Within that magic mirror;

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,
But chained within itself its proud devotion.

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,
And from the very wound of tender thought
Drew solace, and the pity of sweet eyes
Gave strength to bear those gentle agonies,
Surmount the loss, the terror, and the sorrow.
Then Hope approached, she who can borrow
For poor to-day from rich to-morrow;
And Fear withdrew, as night when day
Descends upon the orient ray;
And after long and vain endurance
The poor heart woke to her assurance.

At one birth these four were born
With the world's forgotten morn,
And from Pleasure still they hold
All it circles, as of old.
When, as summer lures the swallow,
Pleasure lures the heart to follow
O weak heart of little wit

The fair hand that wounded it,
Seeking, like a panting hare,
Refuge in the lynx's lair,—
Love, Desire, Hope, and Fear,
Ever will be near.

A SATIRE ON SATIRE

IF gibbets, axes, confiscations, chains,
And racks of subtle torture, if the pains
Of shame, of fiery Hell's tempestuous wave,
Seen through the caverns of the shadowy grave,
Hurling the damned into the murky air
While the meek blest sit smiling; if Despair
And Hate, the rapid bloodhounds with which Terror
Hunts through the world the homeless steps of
Error,

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,
Or charm the dark past never to have been,
Or turn regret to hope; who that has seen.
What Southey is and was, would not exclaim,
Lash on!
be the keen verse dipped in flame;
Follow his flight with wingèd words, and urge

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,
From which his Parthian arrow

Flash on his sight the spectres of the past,
Until his mind's eye paint thereon-

Let scorn like

yawn below,

And rain on him like flakes of fiery snow.
This cannot be, it ought not, evil still
Suffering makes suffering, ill must follow ill.
Rough words beget sad thoughts,

Men take a sullen and a stupid pride

In being all they hate in others' shame,
By a perverse antipathy of fame.

and, beside,

'Tis not worth while to prove, as I could, how
From the sweet fountains of our Nature flow
These bitter waters; I will only say,

If any friend would take Southey some day,
And tell him, in a country walk alone,

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 usual shapes, till the familiar train

Of objects and of persons passed like things
Strange as a dreamer's mad imaginings,
Ginevra from the nuptial altar went;

The vows to which her lips had sworn assent
Rung in her brain still with a jarring din,
Deafening the lost intelligence within.

And so she moved under the bridal veil,
Which made the paleness of her cheek more pale,
And deepened the faint crimson of her mouth,
And darkened her dark locks, as moonlight doth,-
And of the gold and jewels glittering there
She scarce felt conscious, but the weary glare
Lay like a chaos of unwelcome light,
Vexing the sense with gorgeous undelight.
A moonbeam in the shadow of a cloud

Was less heavenly fair- her face was bowed,
And as she passed, the diamonds in her hair
Were mirrored in the polished marble stair
Which led from the cathedral to the street;
And even as she went her light fair feet
Erased these images.

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.