The light winds, which from unstaining wings The beams which dart from many a star The plumed insects swift and free, pass The unseen clouds of the dew, which lie The quivering vapours of dim noontide, Each and all like ministering angels were And when evening descended from Heaven above, And the earth was all rest, and the air was all love, And delight, though less bright, was far more deep, And the day's veil fell from the world of sleep, And the beasts, and the birds, and the insects were drown'd In an ocean of dreams without a sound; Whose waves never mark, though they ever impress The light sand which paves it, consciousness; (Only overhead the sweet nightingale Ever sang more sweet as the day might fail, Were mix'd with the dreams of the Sensitive Plant.) The Sensitive Plant was the earliest PART II. THERE was a Power in this sweet place, Which to the flowers, did they waken or dream, A Lady, the wonder of her kind, Whose form was upborne by a lovely mind Which, dilating, had moulded her mien and motion, Like a sea-flower unfolded beneath the ocean, Tended the garden from morn to even: And the meteors of that sublunar heaven, Like the lamps of the air when night walks forth, Laugh'd round her footsteps up from the earth! She had no companion of mortal race, But her tremulous breath and her flushing face As if some bright spirit for her sweet sake Had deserted heaven while the stars were awake, As if yet around her he lingering were, Though the veil of daylight conceal'd him from her. Her step seem'd to pity the grass it prest; Brought pleasure there and left passion behind. And wherever her airy footstep trod, I doubt not the flowers of that garden sweet She sprinkled bright water from the stream She lifted their heads with her tender hands, And all killing insects and gnawing worms, In a basket, of grasses and wild flowers full, But the bee and the beamlike ephemeris, Whose path is the lightning's, and soft moths that kiss The sweet lips of the flowers, and harm not, did she Make her attendant angels be. And many an ante-natal tomb, Where butterflies dream of the life to come, She left clinging round the smooth and dark This fairest creature, from earliest spring And ere the first leaf look'd brown-she died! PART III. THREE days the flowers of the garden fair, She floats up through the smoke of Vesuvius. And on the fourth, the Sensitive Plant And the steps of the bearers, heavy and slow, The weary sound and the heavy breath, The dark grass, and the flowers among the grass, Were bright with tears as the crowd did pass : From their sighs the wind caught a mournful tone, And sate in the pines, and gave groan for groan. |