Is all on flame, a censer filled with odors,
And to my mind, who feel thy fearful power,
Suggesting passive terrors and delights,
A slumbering volcano: thy dark cheek,
Warm and transparent, by its half-form'd dimple
Reveals an under-world of wondrous things
Ripe in their richness, as among the bays
Of blest Bermuda, through the sapphire deep,
Ruddy and white fantastically branch

The coral groves; thy broad and sunny brow,
Made fertile by the genial smile of heaven,
Shoots up an hundred-fold the glorious crop
Of arabesque ideas; forth from thy curls,
Half hidden in their black luxuriance,
The twining sister-graces lightly spring,
The muses, and the passions, and young love,
Tritons and Naiads, Pegasus, and Sphinx,
Atlas, Briareus, Paxton, and Cyclops,

Centaurs, and shapes uncouth, and wild conceits:
And in the midst blazes the star of mind,
Illumining the classic portico

That leads to the high dome where Learning sits:
On either side of that broad sunny brow
Flame-color'd pinions, streak'd with gold and blue,
Burst from the teeming brain; while under them
The forked lightning, and the cloud-rob'd thunder,
And fearful shadows, and unhallow'd eyes,
And strange foreboding forms of terrible things,
Lurk in the midnight of thy raven locks.

And thou hast been the sunshine to my landscape,
Imagination; thou hast wreathed me smiles,
And hung them on a statue's marble lips;

Hast made earth's dullest pebbles bright like gems:
Hast lent me thine own silken clue, to rove
The ideal labyrinths of a thousand spheres;
Hast lengthen'd out my nights with life-long dreams,
And with glad seeming gilt my darkest day;
Helped me to scale in thought the walls of heaven,

While journeying wearily this busy world;

Sent me to pierce the palpable clouds with eagles,
And with leviathan the silent deep;

Hast taught my youthful spirit to expand
Beyond himself, and live in other scenes,
And other times, and among other men;

Hast bid me cherish, silent and alone,

First feelings, and young hopes, and better aims,
And sensibilities of delicate sort.

Like timorous mimosas, which the breath,
The cold and cautious breath of daily life,

Hath not as yet had power to blight and kill
From my heart's garden; for they stand retired,
Screen'd from the north by groves of rooted thought.

Without thine aid, how cheerless were all time,
But chief the short sweet hours of earliest love;
When the young mind, athirst for happiness,
And all-exulting in that new-found treasure,
The wealth of being loved, as well as loving,
Sees not, and hears not, knows not, thinks not, speaks not,
Except it be of her, his one desire;

And thy rose-color'd glass on every scene

With more than earthly promise cheats the eye,
While the charm'd ear drinks thy melodious words,
And the heart reels, drunk with ideal beauty.

So too the memory of departed joy,

Walking in black with sprinkled tears of pearl,
Passes before the mind with look less stern

And foot more lighten'd, when thine inward power,
Most gentle friend, upon that clouded face
Sheds the fair light of better joys to come,

And throws round Grief the azure scarf of Hope.

As the wild chamois bounds from rock to rock,
Oft on the granite steeples nicely poised,
Unconscious that the cliff from which he hangs
Was once a fiery sea of molten stone,
Shot up ten thousand feet and crystallized,

When earth was laboring with her kraken brood;
So have I sped with thee, my bright-eyed love,
Imagination, over pathless wilds,

Bounding from thought to thought, unmindful of
The fever of my soul that shot them up
And made a ready footing for my speed,
As like the whirlwind I have flown along,
Winged with ecstatic mind, and carried away,
Like Ganymede of old, o'er cloud-capt Ida,
Or Alps, or Andes, or the ice-bound shores
Of Arctic or Antarctic, stolen from earth
Her sister-planets and the twinkling eyes
That watched her from afar, to the pure seat
Of rarest Matter's last created world,
And brilliant halls of self-existing Light.

THE SONG OF AN ALPINE ELF.

Ha, ha, ha! - My coy Jungfra

Is tall and robed in snow,

Yet at a leap to the cloudy steep
I bound from the glen below;
On her dizziest peak I sit and shriek

To the winds that around me blow,
And heard from afar is my ha, ha, ha!
The wild laugh echoes so.

In the forest dun round Lauterbrunn,
That line each dark ravine,

I hide me away from the garish day
Till the howling winter's e'en;

Then I jump on high through the coal-black sky,
And light on some cliff of snow

That nods to its fall like a tottering wall,

And I rock it to and fro!

My summer's home is the cataract's foam,
As it floats in a frothing heap;

My winter's rest is the weasel's nest,
Or deep with the mole I sleep:
I ride for a freak on the lightning-streak,
And mingle among the clouds,
My swarthy form with the thunder-storm,
Wrapped in its sable shrouds.

Often I launch the huge avalanche,

And make it my milk-white sledge, When, unappall'd, to the Grindelwald

I slide from the Shrikehorn's edge: Silent and soft to the ibex oft

I have stolen, and hurried him o'er The precipice to the bristling ice

That smokes with his scarlet gore.

But my greatest joy is to lure and decoy
To the chasm's slippery brink

The hunter bold, when he's weary and old,
And there let him suddenly sink,

A thousand feet - dead! - he dropp'd like lead,
Ha, he couldn't leap like me;

With broken back, as a felon on rack,

He hangs in a split pine-tree.

And there 'mid his bones, that echoed with groans. I make me a nest of his hair

The ribs dry and white rattle loud as in spite, When I rock in my cradle there:

Hurrah, hurrah, and ha, ha, ha!

I'm in a merry mood,

For I'm all alone in my palace of bone,
That's tapestried fair with the old man's hair,
And dappled with clots of blood:

And when I look out all around and about,
The storm shouts high to the coal-black sky,

And the icicle sleet falls thick and fleet,
And all that I hear on the mountain drear,
And all I behold in the valleys cold,
Is death and solitude.

It is a happy thing to dream,

When rosy thoughts and visions bright
Pour on the soul a golden stream
Of rich luxurious delight:

It is a weary thing to dream,

When from the hot and aching brain,
As from a boiling cauldron, steam
The myriad forms in fancy's train.

It is a curious thing to dream,

When shapes grotesque of all quaint things, Like laughing water-witches seem

To sport in reason's turbid springs:

It is a glorious thing to dream,

When full of wings and full of eyes,
Borne on the whirlwind or sunbeam,
We race along the startled skies:

It is a wondrous thing to dream
Of tumbling with a fearful shock
From some tall cliff where eagles scream,
-To light upon a feather rock: