Where some old cavern hoar seems yet to keep Where secure sleep may kill thine innocent lights; Our breath shall intermix, our bosoms bound, As mountain springs under the morning Sun. Those spheres instinct with it become the same, Burning, yet ever inconsumable: In one another's substance finding food, Like flames too pure and light and unimbued And one annihilation. Woe is me! The winged words on which my soul would pierce Into the height of love's rare Universe, Are chains of lead around its flight of fire. I pant, I sink, I tremble, I expire ! Weak Verses, go, kneel at your Sovereign's feet, And say: "We are the masters of thy slave; "What wouldest thou with us and ours and thine?" Then call your sisters from Oblivion's cave, All singing loud: "Love's very pain is sweet, "But its reward is in the world divine "Which, if not here, it builds beyond the grave." So shall ye live when I am there. Then haste Marina, Vanna, Primus, and the rest, And bid them love each other and be blest : And leave the troop which errs, and which reproves, And come and be my guest, - for I am Love's. DEATH. I. DEATH is here and death is there, Death is busy everywhere, All around, within, beneath, and when Our hopes, and then our fears These are dead, the debt is due, Dust claims dust and we die too. IV. All things that we love and cherish, Love itself would, did they not. AUTUM N. A DIRGE. I. THE warm sun is failing, the bleak wind is wailing, On the earth her death-bed, in a shroud of leaves dead, Come, months, come away, From November to May, In your saddest array ; Of the dead cold year, And like dim shadows watch by her sepulchre. II. The chill rain is falling, the nipt worm is crawling, For the year; The blithe swallows are flown, and the lizards each gone To his dwelling; Come, months, come away; Put on white, black, and grey; Let your light sisters play – Ye, follow the bier Of the dead cold year, And make her grave green with tear on tear. LETTER TO MARIA GISBORNE. LEGHORN, July 1, 1820. THE spider spreads her webs, whether she be To catch the idle buzzers of the day — But a soft cell, where when that fades away, Whoever should behold me now, I wist, Would think I were a mighty mechanist, Bent with sublime Archimedean art To breathe a soul into the iron heart Of some machine portentous, or strange gin, |