TO

WHEN passion's trance is overpast,
If tenderness and truth could last
Or live, whilst all wild feelings keep
Some mortal slumber, dark and deep,
I should not weep, I should not weep!

It were enough to feel, to see
Thy soft eyes gazing tenderly,

And dream the rest-and burn and be

The secret food of fires unseen,

Couldst thou but be as thou hast been.

After the slumber of the year
The woodland violets re-appear,
All things revive in field or grove,
And sky and sea, but two, which move,
And for all others, life and love.

PASSAGE OF THE APENNINES.

LISTEN, listen, Mary mine,

To the whisper of the Apennine,

It bursts on the roof like the thunder's roar,

Or like the sea on a northern shore,

Heard in its raging ebb and flow

By the captives pent in the cave below.
The Apennine in the light of day

Is a mighty mountain dim and grey,
Which between the earth and sky doth lay;
But when night comes, a chaos dread
On the dim starlight then is spread,

And the Apennine walks abroad with the storm.

May 4th, 1818.

TO MARY

OH! Mary dear, that you were here
With your brown eyes bright and clear,
And your sweet voice, like a bird
Singing love to its lone mate

In the ivy bower disconsolate;

Voice the sweetest ever heard!

Oh! Mary dear, that you were here;
The Castle echo whispers" Here!"

Este, September 1818.

THE PAST.

WILT thou forget the happy hours
Which we buried in Love's sweet bowers,
Heaping over their corpses cold

Blossoms and leaves, instead of mould?
Blossoms which were the joys that fell,
And leaves, the hopes that yet remain.

Forget the dead, the past? O yet
There are ghosts that may take revenge
Memories that make the heart a tomb,

for it,

Regrets which glide through the spirit's gloom, And with ghastly whispers tell

That joy, once lost, is pain.

SONG OF A SPIRIT.

WITHIN the silent centre of the earth
My mansion is; where I lived insphered
From the beginning, and around my sleep
Have woven all the wondrous imagery

Of this dim spot, which mortals call the world;
Infinite depths of unknown elements
Massed into one impenetrable mask;
Sheets of immeasurable fire, and veins

Of gold and stone, and adamantine iron.
And as a veil in which I walk through Heaven

I have wrought mountains, seas, and waves, and clouds,
And lastly light, whose interfusion dawns

In the dark space of interstellar air.