A DREAM WITHIN A DREAM

AKE this kiss upon the brow!

ΤΑΙ

And, in parting from you now,

Thus much let me avow:

You are not wrong who deem
That my days have been a dream;
Yet if hope has flown away
In a night, or in a day,

In a vision, or in none,

Is it therefore the less gone?
All that we see or seem

Is but a dream within a dream.

I stand amid the roar
Of a surf-tormented shore,
And I hold within my hand
Grains of the golden sand-
How few! yet how they creep
Through my fingers to the deep,
While I weep
while I weep!

O God! can I not grasp
Them with a tighter clasp?
O God! can I not save
One from the pitiless wave?
Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream?

SONG

I

SAW thee on thy bridal day,

When a burning blush came o'er thee,

Though happiness around thee lay,

The world all love before thee;

And in thine eye a kindling light (Whatever it might be)

Was all on Earth my aching sight

Of loveliness could see.

That blush, perhaps, was maiden shame:
As such it well may pass,

Though its glow hath raised a fiercer flame
In the breast of him, alas!

Who saw thee on that bridal day,

When that deep blush would come o'er thee,

Though happiness around thee lay,

The world all love before thee.

TO THE RIVER

AIR river! in thy bright, clear flow
Of crystal, wandering water,
Thou art an emblem of the glow

Of beauty the unhidden heart,
The playful maziness of art,

In old Alberto's daughter;

But when within thy wave she looks,
Which glistens then, and trembles,
Why, then, the prettiest of brooks
Her worshipper resembles;
For in his heart, as in thy stream,
Her image deeply lies -

His heart which trembles at the beam
Of her soul-searching eyes.

ΤΟ

THE bowers whereat, in dreams, I see

The wantonest singing birds,

Are lips and all thy melody

Of lip-begotten words;

Thine eyes, in Heaven of heart enshrined,

Then desolately fall,

O God! on my funereal mind

Like starlight on a pall;

Thy heart-thy heart! — I wake and sigh,
And sleep to dream till day

Of the truth that gold can never buy
Of the bawbles that it may.

A DREAM

N visions of the dark night

IN

I have dreamed of joy departed, But a waking dream of life and light Hath left me broken-hearted.

Ah! what is not a dream by day
To him whose eyes are cast
On things around him with a ray
Turned back upon the past?

That holy dream, that holy dream,
While all the world were chiding,
Hath cheered me as a lovely beam
A lonely spirit guiding.

What though that light, through storm and night,

So trembled from afar,

What could there be more purely bright
In Truth's day-star?