XIII.

Teach us, sprite or bird,

What sweet thoughts are thine :

I have never heard

Praise of love or wine

That panted forth a flood of rapture so divine.

XIV.

Chorus hymeneal

Or triumphal chaunt,

Matched with thine, would be all

But an empty vaunt

A thing wherein we feel there is some hidden want.

XV.

What objects are the fountains

Of thy happy strain?

What fields, or waves, or mountains?

What shapes of sky or plain?

What love of thine own kind? what ignorance of pain?

XVI.

With thy clear keen joyance

Languor cannot be :

Shadow of annoyance

Never came near thee:

Thou lovest, but ne'er knew love's sad satiety.

XVII.

Waking or asleep,

Thou of death must deem

Things more true and deep

Than we mortals dream,

Or how could thy notes flow in such a crystal stream?

XVIII.

We look before and after,

And pine for what is not:

Our sincerest laughter

With some pain is fraught;

Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought

XIX.

Yet, if we could scorn

Hate and pride and fear,

If we were things born

Not to shed a tear,

I know not how thy joy we ever should come near.

XX.

Better than all measures

Of delightful sound,
Better than all treasures

That in books are found,

Thy skill to poet were, thou scorner of the ground?

XXI.

Teach me half the gladness

That thy brain must know;

Such harmonious madness

From my lips would flow

The world should listen then as I am listening now.

ΤΟ

I FEAR thy kisses, gentle maiden ;
Thou needest not fear mine,-
My spirit is too deeply laden

Ever to burden thine.

I fear thy mien, thy tones, thy motion;
Thou needest not fear mine,-
Innocent is the heart's devotion

With which I worship thine.

SONG OF PROSERPINE,

WHILST GATHERING FLOWERS ON THE PLAIN OF ENNA.

SACRED Goddess, Mother Earth,

Thou from whose immortal bosom
Gods and men and beasts have birth,
Leaf and blade, and bud and blossom,
Breathe thine influence most divine
On thine own child, Proserpine.

If with mists of evening dew

Thou dost nourish these young flowers
Till they grow in scent and hue

Fairest children of the Hours,

Breathe thine influence most divine
On thine own child, Proserpine.

THE TWO SPIRITS.

AN ALLEGORY.

FIRST SPIRIT.

O THOU who plumed with strong desire
Wouldst float above the earth, beware!
A shadow tracks thy flight of fire-

Night is coming!

Bright are the regions of the air,
And among the winds and beams
It were delight to wander there-
Night is coming!

SECOND SPIRIT.

The deathless stars are bright above :
If I would cross the shade of night,
Within my heart is the lamp of love,
And that is day;

And the moon will smile with gentle light
On my golden plumes where'er they move;
The meteors will linger round my flight,

And make night day.

FIRST SPIRIT.

But if the whirlwinds of darkness waken
Hail and lightning and stormy rain?
See, the bounds of the air are shaken-
Night is coming!

The red swift clouds of the hurricane

Yon declining sun have overtaken,

The clash of the hail sweeps over the plainNight is coming!

SECOND SPIRIT.

I see the light, and I hear the sound.

I'll sail on the flood of the tempest dark, With the calm within and the light around Which makes night day :

And thou, when the gloom is deep and stark, Look from thy dull earth, slumber-bound; My moonlike flight thou then mayst mark On high, far away.

Some say there is a precipice

Where one vast pine is frozen to ruin O'er piles of snow and chasms of ice Mid Alpine mountains ;

And that the languid storm, pursuing
That winged shape, for ever flies

Round those hoar branches, aye renewing
Its aëry fountains.

Some say, when nights are dry and clear,
And the death-dews sleep on the morass,

Sweet whispers are heard by the traveller,
Which make night day :

And a silver shape like his early love doth pass,

Upborne by her wild and glittering hair;

And, when he wakes on the fragrant grass,

He finds night day.

ODE TO NAPLES.

EPODE I. a.

I STOOD within the city disinterred;

And heard the autumnal leaves like light footfalls Of spirits passing through the streets; and heard The mountain's slumberous voice at intervals

Thrill through those roofless halls. The oracular thunder penetrating shook

The listening soul in my suspended blood :

I felt that Earth out of her deep heart spoke-
I felt, but heard not. Through white columns glowed
The isle-sustaining ocean-flood,

A plane of light between two heavens of azure.

Around me gleamed many a bright sepulchre,
Of whose pure beauty Time, as if his pleasure
Were to spare Death, had never made erasure ;
But every living lineament was clear

As in the sculptor's thought, and there
The wreaths of stony myrtle, ivy, and pine,
Like winter-leaves o'ergrown by moulded snow,
Seemed only not to move and grow

Because the crystal silence of the air

Weighed on their life, even as the Power divine
Which then lulled all things brooded upon mine.

EPODE II. a

Then gentle winds arose,

With many a mingled close

Of wild Æolian sound and mountain-odour keen.

And where the Baian ocean

Welters, with air-like motion,

Within, above, around its bowers of starry green,
Moving the sea-flowers in those purple caves,
Even as the ever-stormless atmosphere

Floats o'er the Elysian realm,

It bore me (like an angel o'er the waves
Of sunlight, whose swift pinnace of dewy air
No storm can overwhelm).

I sailed where ever flows

Under the calm serene