Spawn, weeds, and filth, a leprous scum, Made the running rivulet thick and dumb, And at its outlet, flags huge as stakes Dammed it up with roots knotted like watersnakes.

And hour by hour, when the air was still, The vapors arose, which have strength to kill; At morn they were seen, at noon they were felt,

At night they were darkness no star could melt.

And unctuous meteors from spray to spray
Crept and flitted in broad noonday
Unseen; every branch on which they alit
By a venomous blight was burned and bit.

The Sensitive-Plant, like one forbid,
Wept, and the tears within each lid
Of its folded leaves which together grew,
Were changed to a blight of frozen glue.

For the leaves soon fell, and the branches

soon

By the heavy axe of the blast were hewn ;

The sap

shrank to the root through every pore, As blood to a heart that will beat no more.

For Winter came. The wind was his whip; One choppy finger was on his lip;

He had torn the cataracts from the hills,

And they clanked at his girdle like manacles;

His breath was a chain which without a sound

The earth, and the air, and the water bound; He came, fiercely driven in his chariot-throne By the tenfold blasts of the arctic zone.

Then the weeds which were forms of living death,

Fled from the frost to the earth beneath;
Their decay and sudden flight from frost
Was but like the vanishing of a ghost!

And under the roots of the Sensitive-Plant The moles and the dormice died for want: The birds dropped stiff from the frozen air, And were caught in the branches naked and bare.

First there came down a thawing rain,
And its dull drops froze on the boughs again;
Then there steamed up a freezing dew
Which to the drops of the thaw-rain grew ;

And a northern whirlwind, wandering about Like a wolf that had smelt a dead child out, Shook the boughs thus laden and heavy and stiff,

And snapped them off with his rigid griff.

When winter had gone and spring came back, The Sensitive-Plant was a leafless wreck; But the mandrakes, and toadstools, and docks and darnels,

Rose like the dead from their ruined charnels.

CONCLUSION.

WHETHER the Sensitive-Plant, or that Which within its boughs like a spirit sat, Ere its outward form had known decay, Now felt this change, I cannot say.

Whether that lady's gentle mind,
No longer with the form combined
Which scattered love, as stars do light,
Found sadness, where it left delight,

I dare not guess; but in this life
Of error, ignorance and strife,
Where nothing is, but all things seem,
And we the shadows of the dream,

It is a modest creed, and yet
Pleasant, if one considers it,
To own that death itself must be,
Like all the rest, a mockery.

That garden sweet, that lady fair,
And all sweet shapes and odors there,

In truth have never passed away :
'Tis we, 't is ours, are changed! not they.

For love, and beauty, and delight,
There is no death nor change; their might
Exceeds our organs, which endure
No light, being themselves obscure.

LOVE'S PHILOSOPHY.

HE fountains mingle with the river,
And the rivers with the ocean,

The winds of heaven mix forever

With a sweet emotion;

Nothing in the world is single;
All things by a law divine
In one another's being mingle:
Why not I with thine?

See the mountains kiss high heaven,
And the waves clasp one another;
No sister flower would be forgiven
If it disdained its brother;
And the sunlight clasps the earth,
And the moonbeams kiss the sea:
What are all these kissings worth,
If thou kiss not me?