She rose like an autumnal Night, that springs

Out of the East, and follows wild and drear

The golden Day, which, on eternal wings,
Even as a ghost abandoning a bier,
Had left the Earth a corpse. Sorrow
and fear

So struck, so roused, so rapt Urania;
So saddened round her like an atmosphere
Of stormy mist; so swept her on her way
Even to the mournful place where Adonais
lay.

Out of her secret Paradise she sped, Through camps and cities rough with stone, and steel,

And human hearts, which to her airy tread

Yielding not, wounded the invisible

Palms of her tender feet where'er they fell:

And barbed tongues, and thoughts more sharp than they

Rent the soft Form they never could repel,

Whose sacred blood, like the young tears of May,

Paved with eternal flowers that undeserving way.

In the death chamber for a moment Death

Shamed by the presence of that living Might

Blushed to annihilation, and the breath Revisited those lips, and life's pale light Flashed through those limbs, so late her dear delight.

"Leave me not wild and drear and comfortless,

As silent lightning leaves the starless night!

Leave me not!" cried Urania: her distress Roused Death: Death rose and smiled, and met her vain caress.

"Stay yet awhile! speak to me once again;

Kiss me, so long but as a kiss may live; And in my heartless breast and burning brain

That word, that kiss, shall all thoughts else survive,

With food of saddest memory kept alive,
Now thou art dead, as if it were a part
Of thee, my Adonais! I would give
All that I am to be as thou now art!
But I am chained to Time, and cannot
thence depart!

"O gentle child, beautiful as thou wert, Why didst thou leave the trodden paths of men

Too soon, and with weak hands though mighty heart

Dare the unpastured dragon in his den? Defenceless as thou wert, oh where was then

Wisdom the mirrored shield, or scorn the spear?

Or hadst thou waited the full cycle, when Thy spirit should have filled its crescent sphere,

The monsters of life's waste had fled from thee like deer.

Thus ceased she: and the mountain shepherds came,

Their garlands sere, their magic mantles rent;

The Pilgrim of Eternity, whose fame
Over his living head like Heaven is bent,
An early but enduring monument,

Came, veiling all the lightnings of his song
In sorrow; from her wilds Ierne sent
The sweetest lyrist of her saddest wrong,
And love taught grief to fall like music
from his tongue.

Midst others of less note, came one frail
Form,

A phantom among men; companionless
As the last cloud of an expiring storm
Whose thunder is its knell; he, as I guess,
Had gazed on Nature's naked loveliness,
Actæon-like, and now he fled astray
With feeble steps o'er the world's wil-
derness,

And his own thoughts, along that rugged

wear;

Torturing th' unwilling dross that checks its flight

To its own likeness, as each mass may bear;

And bursting in its beauty and its might From trees and beasts and men into the Heaven's light.

The splendours of the firmament of time May be eclipsed, but are extinguished not;

Like stars to their appointed height they climb

And death is a low mist which cannot blot

The brightness it may veil. When lofty thought

Lifts a young heart above its mortal lair, And love and life contend in it, for what Shall be its earthly doom, the dead live there

And move like winds of light on dark and stormy air.

The inheritors of unfulfilled renown
Rose from their thrones, built beyond
mortal thought,

Far in the Unapparent. Chatterton
Rose pale, his solemn agony had not
Yet faded from him; Sidney, as he fought
And as he fell and as he lived and loved
Sublimely mild, a Spirit without spot,
Arose; and Lucan, by his death approved:
Oblivion as they rose shrank like a thing
reproved.

And many more, whose names on Earth are dark

But whose transmitted effluence cannot die

So long as fire outlives the parent spark, Rose, robed in dazzling immortality. "Thou art become as one of us," they

cry,

"It was for thee yon kingless sphere has long

Swung blind in unascended majesty,
Silent alone amid an Heaven of Song.
Assume thy wingèd throne, thou Vesper
of our throng!"

forth

Oh come