We paused before the heritage of men,
And thy star trembled as doth Beauty then!"

Thus, in discourse, the lovers whiled away

The night that waned, and waned, and brought no day. They fell: for Heaven to them no hope imparts

Who hear not for the beating of their hearts.

"THE HAPPIEST DAY, THE HAPPIEST

ΤΗ

HOUR "

HE happiest day, the happiest hour My seared and blighted heart hath known, The highest hope of pride and power,

I feel hath flown.

Of power, said I? yes! such I ween;

But they have vanished long, alas!

The visions of my youth have been
But let them pass.

And, pride, what have I now with thee?
Another brow may even inherit
The venom thou hast poured on me
Be still, my spirit!

But were that hope of pride and power

Now offered, with the pain

Even then I felt, — that brightest hour

I would not live again.

For on its wing was dark alloy,
And, as it fluttered, fell

An essence, powerful to destroy
A soul that knew it well.

STANZAS

How often we forget all time, when lone
Admiring Nature's universal throne;
Her woods her wilds her mountains
Reply of HERs to OUR intelligence!

1

the intense

BYRON: The Island.

N youth have I known one with whom the Earth, In secret, communing held, as he with it,

In daylight, and in beauty from his birth;

Whose fervid, flickering torch of life was lit

From the sun and stars, whence he had drawn forth

A passionate light—such for his spirit was fit

And yet that spirit knew not, in the hour
Of its own fervor, what had o'er it power.

2

Perhaps it may be that my mind is wrought
To a fever by the moonbeam that hangs o'er;
But I will half believe that wild light fraught
With more of sovereignty than ancient lore
Hath ever told; or is it of a thought

The unembodied essence, and no more,

That with a quickening spell doth o'er us pass
As dew of the night-time o'er the summer grass?

Doth o'er us pass, when, as the expanding eye
To the loved object, so the tear to the lid
Will start, which lately slept in apathy?
And yet it need not be that object — hid
From us in life, but common which doth lie
Each hour before us - but then only bid

With a strange sound, as of a harp-string broken,
To awake us. "T is a symbol and a token

4

Of what in other worlds shall be, and given
In beauty by our God to those alone
Who otherwise would fall from life and Heaven,
Drawn by their heart's passion, and that tone,
That high tone of the spirit, which hath striven,
Though not with Faith, with godliness, whose throne
With desperate energy 't hath beaten down;
Wearing its own deep feeling as a crown.

"T

EVENING STAR

WAS noontide of summer,

And stars, in their orbits,
Shone pale, through the light
Of the brighter, cold moon,
'Mid planets her slaves,
Herself in the Heavens,
Her beam on the waves.
I gazed awhile

On her cold smile,

Too cold - too cold for me;

There passed, as a shroud,
A fleecy cloud,

And I turned away to thee,
Proud Evening Star,

In thy glory afar,

And dearer thy beam shall be;

For joy to my heart

Is the proud part

Thou bearest in Heaven at night,

And more I admire

Thy distant fire

Than that colder, lowly light.