Is gathering on the mountains, like a We watched the ocean and the sky cloak together, Folded athwart their shoulders broad Under the roof of blue Italian weather; How I ran home through last year's thunder-storm, and bare; The ripe corn under the undulating air Are trembling wide in all their trellised lines The murmur of the awakening sea doth fill The empty pauses of the blast ;-the hill Upon warm my cheek-and how we often made Feasts for each other, where good will outweighed The frugal luxury of our country cheer, Looks hoary through the white electric As well it might, were it less firm and And from the glens beyond, in sullen Than ours must ever be;—and how we strain, The interrupted thunder howls; above One chasm of heaven smiles, like the eye of Love spun A shroud of talk to hide us from the sun On the unquiet world; while such Of all we would believe, and sadly blame things are, How could one worth your friendship heed the war Of worms? the shriek of the world's carrion jays, The jarring and inexplicable frame The purposes and thoughts of men Their censure, or their wonder, or their Were closed in distant years;—or widely praise? guess The issue of the earth's great business, You are not here! the quaint witch When we shall be as we no longer are-Like babbling gossips safe, who hear the war Memory sees In vacant chairs, your absent images, And points where once you sat, and now Of winds, and sigh, but tremble not;— And winged with thoughts of truth and Flags wearily through darkness and despair majesty, Flits round the tyrant's sceptre like a A cloud-encircled meteor of the air, A hooded eagle among blinking owls.— You will see Hunt-one of those happy souls cloud, And bursts the peopled prisons, and cries aloud, "My name is Legion !"-that majestic tongue Which are the salt of the earth, and without whom This world would smell like what it is -a tomb; Which Calderon over the desert flung no doubt Startled oblivion;-thou wert then to Is still adorned by many a cast from me As is a nurse-when inarticulately A child would talk as its grown parents do. If living winds the rapid clouds pursue, If hawks chase doves through the ethereal way, Huntsmen the innocent deer, and beasts their prey, Why should not we rouse with the Out of the forest of the pathless past You are now In London, that great sea, whose ebb and flow At once is deaf and loud, and on the shore Vomits its wrecks, and still howls on for more. Yet in its depth what treasures! You will see That which was Godwin,-greater none than he Though fallen-and fallen on evil times Among the spirits of our age and land, Shout, With graceful flowers tastefully placed about; And coronals of bay from ribbons hung, And brighter wreaths in neat disorder flung; The gifts of the most learn'd among some dozens Of female friends, sisters-in-law, and cousins. And there is he with his eternal puns, Thundering for money at a poet's door; Things wiser than were ever read in Except in Shakespeare's wisest tender ness. You will see Hogg,-and I cannot express His virtues, though I know that they are great, Because he locks, then barricades the gate Within which they inhabit;-of his wit And wisdom, you'll cry out when you are bit. You will see Coleridge-he who sits He is a pearl within an oyster shell, That gleams i' the Indian air-have you And the rare stars rush through them not heard dim and fast :When a man marries, dies, or turns All this is beautiful in every land.— But what see you beside?—a shabby Hindoo, His best friends hear no more of him?— but you Will see him, and will like him too, I hope, With the milk-white Snowdonian Ante lope stand Of Hackney coaches-a brick house or wall Fencing some lonely court, white with the scrawl Of our unhappy politics;-or worseMatched with this cameleopard- - his A wretched woman reeling by, whose Makes such a wound, the knife is lost Mixed with the watchman's, partner of Whether the moon, into her chamber Rude, but made sweet by distance— Leaves midnight to the golden stars, Which cannot be the Nightingale, and or wan Climbs with diminished beams the azure I know none else that sings so sweet yet as it Or whether clouds sail o'er the inverse At this late hour;-and then all is steep; deep, still Piloted by the many-wandering blast, Now Italy or London, which you will! revel Next winter you must pass with me; We'll make our friendly philosophic I'll have My house by that time turned into a Outlast the leafless time; till buds and flowers grave care, Of dead despondence and low-thoughted Warn the obscure inevitable hours, Sweet meeting by sad parting to renew ;"To-morrow to fresh woods and pastures new." And all the dreams which our tormentors Oh! that Hunt, Hogg, Peacock, and With every thing belonging to them We will have books, Spanish, Italian, And ask one week to make another As like his father, as I'm unlike mine, Yet let's be merry: we'll have tea and Custards for supper, and an endless host To thaw the six weeks' winter in our And then we'll talk ;-what shall we talk about? nerves THE WITCH OF ATLAS TO MARY (ON HER OBJECTING TO THE FOLLOWING POEM, UPON THE SCORE OF ITS CONTAINING NO HUMAN INTterest) I How, my dear Mary, are you criticbitten, (For vipers kill, though dead,) by some review, That you condemn these verses I have written, Because they tell no story, false or true! What, though no mice are caught by a young kitten, May it not leap and play as grown cats do, Till its claws come? Prithee, for this one time, Content thee with a visionary rhyme. II With cones and parallelograms and What hand would crush the silken winged fly, The youngest of inconstant April's III VI To thy fair feet a wingèd Vision came, Whose date should have been longer than a day, If you strip Peter, you will see a fellow, Scorched by Hell's hyperequatorial climate And o'er thy head did beat its wings for Into a kind of a sulphureous yellow : fame, And in thy sight its fading plumes display; The watery bow burned in the evening flame, rhyme at ; In shape a Scaramouch, in hue Othello. If you unveil my Witch, no priest nor primate But the shower fell, the swift sun Can shrive you of that sin,-if sin there went his way be And that is dead. Oh let me not In love, when it becomes idolatry. Light the vest of flowing She wears; he, proud as dandy with his stays, Has hung upon his wiry limbs a dress So fair a creature, as she lay enfolden In the warm shadow of her loveliness ;He kissed her with his beams, and made all golden The chamber of gray rock in which she lay Like King Lear's "looped and windowed She, in that dream of joy, dissolved |