Weeping, till sorrow becomes ecstasy:
Then smile on it, so that it may not die.

A violet-shrouded grave of Woe?—I

measure

The world of fancies, seeking one like
thee,

I never thought before my death to see
Youth's vision thus made perfect. Emily, And find-alas! mine own infirmity.

I love thee; though the world by no
thin name

Will hide that love, from its unvalued shame.

Would we two had been twins of the

same mother!

She met me, Stranger, upon life's
rough way,

And lured me towards sweet Death; as
Night by Day,

Winter by Spring, or Sorrow by swift
Hope,

Led into light, life, peace. An ante-
lope,

Or, that the name my heart lent to another
Could be a sister's bond for her and thee,
Blending two beams of one eternity!
Yet were one lawful and the other true, In the suspended impulse of its light-
These names, though dear, could paint

not, as is due,

How beyond refuge I am thine. Ah me!
I am not thine: I am a part of thee.

Sweet Lamp! my moth-like Muse has burnt its wings;

Or, like a dying swan who soars and sings,

ness,

Were less ethereally light: the brightness
Of her divinest presence trembles through
Her limbs, as underneath a cloud of dew
Embodied in the windless Heaven of
June

Amid the splendour-winged stars, the
Moon

Burns, inextinguishably beautiful:

Young Love should teach Time, in his And from her lips, as from a hyacinth

own gray style, All that thou art.

guile,

full

Art thou not void of Of honey-dew, a liquid murmur drops,
Killing the sense with passion; sweet as

A lovely soul formed to be blest and

bless?

A well of sealed and secret happiness,
Whose waters like blithe light and music

are,

Vanquishing dissonance and gloom? A
Star

Which moves not in the moving
Heavens, alone?

A smile amid dark frowns? a gentle

tone

Amid rude voices? a beloved light?
A Solitude, a Refuge, a Delight?

stops

Of planetary music heard in trance.
In her mild lights the starry spirits

dance,

The sunbeams of those wells which ever
leap

Under the lightnings of the soul-too
deep

For the brief fathom-line of thought or

sense.

The glory of her being, issuing thence,
Stains the dead, blank, cold air with a
warm shade

A Lute, which those whom Love has Of unentangled intermixture, made

taught to play

Make music on, to soothe the roughest

day

By Love, of light and motion: one in

tense

Diffusion, one serene Omnipresence, And lull fond grief asleep? a buried Whose flowing outlines mingle in their

A cradle of young thoughts of wingless Around her cheeks and utmost fingers glowing

pleasure;

With the unintermitted blood, which That Love makes all things equal: I

And in the soul a wild odour is felt,
Beyond the sense, like fiery dews that But not as now :--

Under whose motions life's dull billows As trembling leaves in a continuous air?

Shall I descend, and perish not? I To cold oblivion, though it is in the code Of modern morals, and the beaten road

Which those poor slaves with weary Of pleasure may be gained, of sorrow

Who travel to their home among the This truth is that deep well, whence

The dreariest and the longest journey go. Is as a garden ravaged, and whose strife Tills for the promise of a later birth

True Love in this differs from gold The wilderness of this Elysian earth.

Gazing on many truths; 'tis like thy
light,

Imagination! which from earth and sky,
And from the depths of human phantasy,
As from a thousand prisms and mirrors,
fills

The Universe with glorious beams, and
kills

Error, the worm, with many a sun-like

arrow

Of its reverberated lightning. Narrow The heart that loves, the brain that contemplates,

The life that wears, the spirit that

creates

There was a Being whom my spirit

oft

Met on its visioned wanderings, far aloft,
In the clear golden prime of my youth's
dawn,

Upon the fairy isles of sunny lawn,
Amid the enchanted mountains, and the

caves

Of divine sleep, and on the air-like

waves

Of wonder-level dream, whose tremulous floor

Paved her light steps;-on an imagined shore,

Under the gray beak of some promontory

She met me, robed in such exceeding glory,

One object, and one form, and builds That I beheld her not.

thereby

A sepulchre for its eternity.

Mind from its object differs most in this:

Evil from good; misery from happiness;

In solitudes Her voice came to me through the whispering woods,

And from the fountains, and the odours deep

Of flowers, which, like lips murmuring in their sleep

The baser from the nobler; the impure Of the sweet kisses which had lulled And frail, from what is clear and must endure.

them there,

Breathed but of her to the enamoured air;

If you divide suffering and dross, you And from the breezes whether low or

Each part exceeds the whole; and we And from all sounds, all silence. In

the words

How much, while any yet remains un- Of antique verse and high romance,-in form,

shared,

Sound, colour-in whatever checks that Over the sightless tyrants of our fate; But neither prayer nor verse could dis

Storm

Makes this cold common hell, our life, a That world within this Chaos, mine and

doom

As glorious as a fiery martyrdom;

Her Spirit was the harmony of truth.

me,

Of which she was the veiled Divinity, The world I say of thoughts that worshipped her :

Then, from the caverns of my dreamy And therefore I went forth, with hope youth and fear

I sprang, as one sandalled with plumes And every gentle passion sick to death, Feeding my course with expectation's breath,

of fire,

And towards the loadstar of my one

desire,

I flitted, like a dizzy moth, whose flight
Is as a dead leaf's in the owlet light,
When it would seek in Hesper's setting
sphere

A radiant death, a fiery sepulchre,
As if it were a lamp of earthly flame.-
But She, whom prayers or tears then
could not tame,

Into the wintry forest of our life ;
And struggling through its error with
vain strife,

And stumbling in my weakness and my
haste,

And half bewildered by new forms, I

past

Seeking among those untaught foresters If I could find one form resembling hers, Past, like a God throned on a wingèd In which she might have masked herself planet,

from me.

Whose burning plumes to tenfold swift- There,-One, whose voice was venomed

Into the dreary cone of our life's shade; Sate by a well, under blue nightshade And as a man with mighty loss dis

mayed,

I would have followed, though the grave between

bowers;

The breath of her false mouth was like faint flowers,

Her touch was as electric poison,—flame

Yawned like a gulf whose spectres are Out of her looks into my vitals came,

unseen:

When a voice said :- "O Thou of hearts the weakest,

The phantom is beside thee whom thou

seekest."

And from her living cheeks and bosom

flew

A killing air, which pierced like honeydew

Into the core of my green heart, and lay Then I "Where?" the world's echo Upon its leaves; until, as hair grown

And in that silence, and in my despair, O'er a young brow, they hid its unblown I questioned every tongueless wind that

And murmured names and spells which And some were fair-but beauty dies

Others were wise-but honeyed words Alas, I then was nor alive nor dead :For at her silver voice came Death and Life,

Trembled, for pity of my strife and pain. When, like a noonday dawn, there And cried " Away, he is not of our shone again

Deliverance. One stood on my path I wept, and though it be a dream, I who seemed

And from her presence life was radiated And there I lay, within a chaste cold Through the gray earth and branches