To hear each other's whisper'd speech; To watch the crisping ripples on the beach, To the influence of mild-minded melancholy; To muse and brood and live again in memory, Heap'd over with a mound of grass, Two handfuls of white dust, shut in an urn of brass! 6. Dear is the memory of our wedded lives, And dear the last embraces of our wives And their warm tears: but all hath suffer'd change; For surely now our household hearths are cold: Our sons inherit us: our looks are strange : And we should come like ghosts to trouble joy. Have eat our substance, and the minstrel sings And our great deeds, as half-forgotten things. Is there confusion in the little isle ? Let what is broken so remain. The Gods are hard to reconcile : 'Tis hard to settle order once again. There is confusion worse than death, Trouble on trouble, pain on pain, Long labour unto aged breath, Sore task to hearts worn out with many wars And eyes grown dim with gazing on the pilot-stars. 7. But, propt on beds of amaranth and moly, How sweet (while warm airs lull us, blowing lowly,) With half-dropt eyelids still, Beneath a heaven dark and holy, To watch the long bright river drawing slowly His waters from the purple hill— To hear the dewy echoes calling From cave to cave thro' the thick-twined vine To hear the emerald-colour'd water falling Only to hear and see the far-off sparkling brine, Only to hear were sweet, stretch'd out beneath the pine. 8. The Lotos blooms below the flowery peak: The Lotos blows by every winding creek : All day the wind breathes low with mellower tone: Round and round the spicy downs the yellow Lotos-dust is blown. We have had enough of action, and of motion we, was seething free, Where the wallowing monster spouted his foam-fountains in the sea. Let us swear an oath, and keep it with an equal mind, In the hollow Lotos-land to live and lie reclined On the hills like Gods together, careless of mankind. For they lie beside their nectar, and the bolts are hurl'd Far below them in the valleys, and the clouds are lightly curl'd Round their golden houses, girdled with the gleaming world : Where they smile in secret, looking over wasted lands, Blight and famine, plague and earthquake, roaring deeps and fiery sands, Clanging fights, and flaming towns, and sinking ships, and praying hands. But they smile, they find a music centred in a doleful song Suffer endless anguish, others in Elysian valleys dwell, A DREAM OF FAIR WOMEN. I. I READ, before my eyelids dropt their shade, "The Legend of Good Women," long ago Sung by the morning star of song, who made His music heard below; II. Dan Chaucer, the first warbler, whose sweet breath Preluded those melodious bursts, that fill The spacious times of great Elizabeth With sounds that echo still. III. And, for a while, the knowledge of his art Held me above the subject, as strong gales Hold swollen clouds from raining, though my heart, Brimful of those wild tales, |