Are cradled into poetry by wrong:
They learn in suffering what they teach in song."
If I had been an unconnected man,
I, from the moment, should have formed some plan
Never to leave sweet Venice: for to me
It was delight to ride by the lone sea:
And then the town is silent-one may write
Or read in gondolas, by day or night,
Having the little brazen lamp alight,
Unseen, uninterrupted:-books are there,
Pictures, and casts from all those statues fair
Which were twin-born with poetry !—and all
We seek in towns, with little to recall
Regret for the green country:-I might sit
In Maddalo's great palace, and his wit
And subtle talk would cheer the winter night,
And make me know myself:-and the fire light
Would flash upon our faces, till the day
Might dawn, and make me wonder at my stay.
But I had friends in London too. The chief
Attraction here was that I sought relief
From the deep tenderness that maniac wrought
Within me- -'twas perhaps an idle thought,
But I imagined that if, day by day,
I watched him, and seldom went away,
And studied all the beatings of his heart
With zeal, as men study some stubborn art
For their own good, and could by patience find
An entrance to the caverns of his mind,
I might reclaim him from his dark estate.
In friendships I had been most fortunate,
Yet never saw I one whom I would call
More willingly my friend :-and this was all
Accomplished not;-such dreams of baseless good
Oft come and go, in crowds or solitude,
And leave no trace!-but what I now designed
Made, for long years, impression on my mind.
The following morning, urged by my affairs,
I left bright Venice.
And many changes, I returned: the name
Of Venice, and its aspect, was the same;
But Maddalo was travelling, far away,
Among the mountains of Armenia.
His dog was dead: his child had now become
A woman, such as it has been my doom
To meet with few; a wonder of this earth,
Where there is little of transcendent worth,-
Like one of Shakspeare's women. Kindly she,
And with a manner beyond courtesy,
Received her father's friend; and, when I asked,
Of the lorn maniac, she her memory tasked,
And told, as she had heard, the mournful tale:
"That the poor sufferer's health began to fail
Two years from my departure: but that then
The lady, who had left him, came again;
Her mien had been imperious, but she now
Looked meek; perhaps remorse had brought her low.
Her coming made him better; and they stayed
Together at my father's,-for I played,
As I remember, with the lady's shawl;
I might be six years old :-But, after all,
She left him."-
“Why, her heart must have been tough;
"And was not this enough?
Child, is there no more?"
Something within that interval which bore The stamp of why they parted, how they met ;Yet, if thine aged eyes disdain to wet
Those wrinkled cheeks with youth's remembered tears,
Ask me no more; but let the silent years
Be closed and cered over their memory,
As yon mute marble where their corpses lie."
I urged and questioned still: she told me how
All happened-but the cold world shall not know.
THE WOODMAN AND THE NIGHTINGALE.
A WOODMAN, whose rough heart was out of tune (I think such hearts yet never came to good), Hated to hear, under the stars or moon,
One nightingale in an interfluous wood
Satiate the hungry dark with melody ;-
And, as a vale is watered by a flood,
Or as the moonlight fills the open sky
Struggling with darkness-as a tuberose
Peoples some Indian dell with scents which lie
Like clouds above the flower from which they rose, The singing of that happy nightingale
In this sweet forest, from the golden close
Of evening till the star of dawn may fail,
Was interfused upon the silentness;
The folded roses and the violets pale
Heard her within their slumbers, the abyss
Of heaven with all its planets; the dull ear
Of the night-cradled earth; the loneliness
Of the circumfluous waters,-every sphere
And every flower and beam and cloud and wave,
And every wind of the mute atmosphere,
And every beast stretched in its rugged cave,
And every bird lulled on its mossy bough,
And every silver moth, fresh from the grave,
Which is its cradle-ever from below
Aspiring like one who loves too fair, too far,
To be consumed within the purest glow
Of one serene and unapproached star,
As if it were a lamp of earthly light,
Unconscious as some human lovers are,
Itself how low, how high, beyond all height
The heaven where it would perish !—and every form
That worshipped in the temple of the night
Was awed into delight, and by the charm
Girt as with an interminable zone,
Whilst that sweet bird, whose music was a storm
Of sound, shook forth the dull oblivion
Out of their dreams; harmony became love every soul but one.
And so this man returned with axe and saw
At evening close from killing the tall treen,
The soul of whom by nature's gentle law
Was each a wood-nymph, and kept ever green
The pavement and the roof of the wild copse,
Chequering the sunlight of the blue serene
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