Till human thoughts might kneel alone
Each before the judgment-throne

Of its own aweless soul, or of the power unknown!
O, that the words which make the thoughts obscure
From which they spring, as clouds of glimmer-
ing dew

From a white lake blot heaven's blue portraiture,

Were stript of their thin masks and various hue And frowns and smiles and splendours not their own, Till in the nakedness of false and true

They stand before their Lord, each to receive its due.

He who taught men to vanquish whatsoever
Can be between the cradle and the grave
Crowned him the King of Life. O vain endeavour!
If on his own high will a willing slave,

He has enthroned the oppression and the oppressor.
What if earth can clothe and feed

Amplest millions at their need,

And power in thought be as the tree within the seed? O, what if Art, an ardent intercessor,

Driving on fiery wings to Nature's throne, Checks the great mother stooping to caress her, And cries: Give me, thy child, dominion

Over all height and depth? if Life can breed
New wants, and wealth from those who toil and

groan

Rend of thy gifts and hers a thousand fold for one.

Come Thou, but lead out of the inmost cave
Of man's deep spirit, as the morning-star
Beckons the Sun from the Eoan wave,

Wisdom. I hear the pennons of her car

Self-moving, like cloud charioted by flame;
Comes she not, and come ye not,
Rulers of eternal thought,

To judge, with solemn truth, life's ill-apportioned lot?
Blind Love, and equal Justice, and the Fame
Of what has been, the Hope of what will be?
O, Liberty! if such could be thy name

Wert thou disjoined from these, or they from thee:
If thine or theirs were treasures to be bought
By blood or tears, have not the wise and free
Wept tears, and blood like tears?

harmony

The solemn

Paused, and the spirit of that mighty singing
To its abyss was suddenly withdrawn ;
Then, as a wild swan, when sublimely winging
Its path athwart the thunder-smoke of dawn,
Sinks headlong through the aërial golden light
On the heavy sounding plain,

When the bolt has pierced its brain;

As summer clouds dissolve, unburthened of their rain; As a far taper fades with fading night,

As a brief insect dies with dying day, My song, its pinions disarrayed of might,

Drooped; o'er it closed the echoes far away Of the great voice which did its flight sustain, As waves which lately paved his watery way Hiss round a drowner's head in their tempestuous

play.

F

Poems on Time and its Changes.

OZYMANDIAS.

I MET a traveller from an antique land

Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desart. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
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:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

TIME.

UNFATHOMABLE Sea! whose waves are years,
Ocean of Time, whose waters of deep woe
Are brackish with the salt of human tears!

Thou shoreless flood, which in thy ebb and flow Claspest the limits of mortality!

And sick of prey, yet howling on for more, Vomitest thy wrecks on its inhospitable shore; Treacherous in calm, and terrible in storm, Who shall put forth on thee, Unfathomable Sea?

1821.

THE SEASONS.

THE blasts of Autumn drive the wingèd seeds Over the earth,―next come the snows, and rain, And frosts, and storms, which dreary Winter leads Out of his Scythian cave, a savage train ;

Behold! Spring sweeps over the world again, Shedding soft dews from her ætherial wings;

Flowers on the mountains, fruits over the plain, And music on the waves and woods she flings, And love on all that lives, and calm on lifeless things.

And, like unfolded flowers beneath the sea,

Like the man's thought dark in the infant's brain, Like aught that is which wraps what is to be,

Art's deathless dreams lay veiled by many a vein Of Parian stone; and yet a speechless child, Verse murmured, and Philosophy did strain Her lidless eyes for thee; when o'er the Ægean main

Athens arose a city such as vision

Builds from the purple crags and silver towers
Of battlemented cloud, as in derision
Of kingliest masonry: the ocean-floors
Pave it; the evening sky pavilions it;
Its portals are inhabited

By thunder-zonèd winds, each head
Within its cloudy wings with sunfire garlanded,
A divine work! Athens diviner yet

Gleamed with its crest of columns, on the will Of man, as on a mount of diamond, set;

For thou wert, and thine all-creative skill Peopled with forms that mock the eternal dead

In marble immortality, that hill

Which was thine earliest throne and latest oracle.

Within the surface of Time's fleeting river

Its wrinkled image lies, as then it lay

Immovably unquiet, and for ever

It trembles, but it cannot pass away! The voices of thy bards and gages thunder With an earth-awakening blast

Through the caverns of the past;

Religion veils her eyes; Oppression n shrinks aghast :