And feed deep thought with many a dream, That Death nor heeds nor hears distress; Or make one mourner weep the less! And thou - who tell'st me to forget, Thy looks are wan, thine eyes are wet. STANZAS FOR MUSIC There be none of Beauty's daughters With a magic like thee; And like music on the waters Is thy sweet voice to me: When, as if its sound were causing The charmed ocean's pausing, The waves lie still and gleaming, And the lull'd winds seem dreaming. And the midnight moon is weaving Her bright chain o'er the deep; Whose breast is gently heaving, As an infant's asleep: So the spirit bows before thee, With a full but soft emotion, Like the swell of Summer's ocean. II ΤΟ To render up thy charge: . . . and, though ne'er yet Thou hast unveiled thy inmost sanctuary, Enough from incommunicable dream, And twilight phantasms, and deep noonday thought, Has shone within me, that serenely now And moveless, as a long-forgotten lyre Suspended in the solitary dome Of some mysterious and deserted fane, I wait thy breath, Great Parent, that my strain 40 46 50 There was a Poet whose untimely tomb No human hands with pious reverence reared, But the charmed eddies of autumnal winds Built o'er his mouldering bones a pyramid Of mouldering leaves in the waste wilderness: A lovely youth, no mourning maiden decked 55 With weeping flowers, or votive cypress wreath, The lone couch of his everlasting sleep:Gentle, and brave, and generous, no lorn bard Breathed o'er his dark fate one melodious sigh: He lived, he died, he sung, in solitude. Strangers have wept to hear his passionate notes, And virgins, as unknown he passed, have pined бо 76 Fled not his thirsting lips, and all of great, With burning smoke, or where bitumen lakes 85 90 95 To avarice or pride, their starry domes 105 His wandering step, Obedient to high thoughts, has visited The awful ruins of the days of old: Athens, and Tyre, and Balbec, and the waste ΙΙΟ 140 145 The Poet wandering on, through Arabie And Persia, and the wild Carmanian waste, And o'er the aërial mountains which pour down Indus and Oxus from their icy caves, In joy and exultation held his way; Till in the vale of Cashmire, far within Its loneliest dell, where odorous plants entwine Beneath the hollow rocks a natural bower, Beside a sparkling rivulet he stretched His languid limbs. A vision on his sleep There came, a dream of hopes that never yet 150 Had flushed his cheek. He dreamed a veiled maid Sate near him, talking in low solemn tones. Her voice was like the voice of his own soul Heard in the calm of thought; its music long, Like woven sounds of streams and breezes, held His inmost sense suspended in its web Of many-coloured woof and shifting hues. Knowledge and truth and virtue were her theme, And lofty hopes of divine liberty, 156 Strange symphony, and in their branching veins 170 Its bursting burthen: at the sound he turned, Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand, Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown, And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, 5 Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive, (stamped on these lifeless things,) The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed: And on the pedestal these words appear: ΙΟ FROM LINES WRITTEN AMONG THE EUGANEAN HILLS Many a green isle needs must be In the deep wide sea of misery, Or the mariner, worn and wan, Never thus could voyage on Day and night, and night and day, Lo, the sun floats up the sky By the skirts of that gray cloud 30 210 215 220 And the sickle to the sword 225 5 Force from force must ever flow, |