Her folded arms wrapping her tattered pall,
Had Melancholy mused herself to sleep.
The fern was pressed beneath her hair,
The dark green adder’s tongue was there;
And still as past the flagging sea-gale weak,
The long lank leaf bowed fluttering o’er her cheek.
That pallid cheek was flushed: her eager look
Beamed eloquent in slumber! Inly wrought,
Imperfect sounds her moving lips forsook,
And her bent forehead worked with troubled thought.
Strange was the dream—–
Nor now with curious sightI mark the glow-worm as I pass,Move with ‘green radiance’ thro’ the grass,An emerald of light.O ever-present to my view!My wafted spirit is with you,And soothes your boding fears;I see you all opprest with gloomSit lonely in that cheerless room–Ah me! you are in tears!Belovèd woman! did you flyChilled friendship’s dark…
Soiled beneath the common treadFar from thy protecting spray!When the partridge o’er the sheafWhirred along the yellow vale,Sad, I saw thee, heedless leaf!Love the dalliance of the gale.Lightly didst thou, foolish thing!Heave and flutter to his sighs,While the flatt’rer on his wingWooed and whispered thee to rise.Gayly from thy mother stalkWert thou danced and wafted…
An absolute Self–an element ungrounded–All, that we see, all colours of all shade[Image]By encroach of darkness made ?–Is very life by consciousness unbounded ?And all the thoughts, pains, joys of mortal breath,A war-embrace of wrestling Life and Death ?
To plunder’d Want’s half-shelter’d hovel go,Go, and some hunger-bitten infant hearMoan haply in a dying mother’s ear:Or when the cold and dismal fog-damps broodO’er the rank church-yard with sear elm-leaves strew’d,Pace round some widow’s grave, whose dearer partWas slaughter’d, where o’er his uncoffin’d limbsThe flocking flesh-birds scream’d! Then, while thy heartGroans, and thine eye a…
High Castalie: and (sureties of thy faith)That Pity and Simplicity stood by.And promised for thee that thou shouldst renounceThe world’s low cares and lying vanities,Steadfast and rooted in the heavenly Muse,And washed and sanctified to Poesy.Yes — thou wert plunged but with forgetful handHeld, as by Thetis erst her warrior son:And with those recreant unbaptized…
L—-! methinks, I would not often hearSuch melodies as thine, lest I should loseAll memory of the wrongs and sore distress,For which my miserable brethren weep!But should uncomforted misfortunes steepMy daily bread in tears and bitterness;And if at death’s dread moment I should lie,With no beloved face at my bed-side,To fix the last glance of…
