At evening close from killing the tall The world is full of Woodmen who expel Love's gentle Dryads from the haunts of life, treen, The soul of whom by nature's gentle law Was each a wood-nymph, and kept ever green The pavement and the roof of the wild copse, Chequering the sunlight of the blue serene With jagged leaves, and from the forest tops And vex the nightingales in every dell. MARENGHI1 I LET those who pine in pride or in revenge, Or think that ill for ill should be repaid, Singing the winds to sleep-or weeping Or barter wrong for wrong, until the oft Fast showers of aërial water drops Into their mother's bosom, sweet and soft, exchange Ruins the merchants of such thriftless trade, Visit the tower of Vado, and unlearn Nature's pure tears which have no bitter- Such bitter faith beside Marenghi's urn. In which there is religion-and the mute Monarchy succeeds to Freedom's foison. IV Odours and gleams and murmurs, which In Pisa's church a cup of sculptured gold And thou in painting didst transcribe For when by sound of trumpet was all taught By loftiest meditations; marble knew The sculptor's fearless soul-and as he wrought, The grace of his own power and freedom grew. declared A price upon his life, and there was set A penalty of blood on all who shared So much of water with him as might wet And more than all, heroic, just, sublime, His lips, which speech divided not-he Thou wert among the false-was this thy crime? IX went Alone, as you may guess, to banishment. XIII Yes; and on Pisa's marble walls the Amid the mountains, like a hunted XXI He mocked the stars by grouping on And each weed The summer dewdrops in the golden dawn; SO were XXV kindled powers and thoughts which made His solitude less dark. ory came When mem And, ere the hoar-frost vanished, he (For years gone by leave each a deepen could read Its pictured footprints, as on spots of lawn ing shade), His spirit basked in its internal flame, Its delicate brief touch in silence weaves As, when the black storm hurries round The likeness of the wood's remembered leaves. XXII And many a fresh Spring-morn would he awaken While yet the unrisen sun made glow, like iron Quivering in crimson fire, the peaks unshaken at night, Of mountains and blue isles which Slept in Marenghi still; but that all And felt his life beyond his limbs dilated, XXVII And, when he saw beneath the sunset's planet A black ship walk over the crimson ocean, Till his mind grew like that it contem- Its pennons streaming on the blasts that O MIGHTY mind, in whose deep stream FLOURISHING vine, whose kindling this age Shakes like a reed in the unheeding storm, Why dost thou curb not thine own sacred rage? FRAGMENT: APPEAL TO SILENCE SILENCE! O well are Death and Sleep and Thou Three brethren named, the guardians gloomy-winged Of one abyss, where life, and truth, and joy Are swallowed up-yet spare me, Spirit, pity me, Until the sounds I hear become my soul, And it has left these faint and weary limbs, clusters glow |
