Of him who ruled the helm, although the

pillow For my light head was hollowed in his lap, And my bare limbs his mantle did enwrap,Fearing it was a fiend: at last, he bent O'er me his agèd face, as if to snap

Those dreadful thoughts the gentle grandsire bent,

And to my inmost soul his soothing looks he sent.

XXXII.

A soft and healing potion to my lips
At intervals he raised-now looked on high,
To mark if yet the starry giant dips

His zone in the dim sea-now cheeringly,
Though he said little, did he speak to me.

66

It is a friend beside thee-take good cheer, Poor victim, thou art now at liberty!" I joyed as those a human tone to hear, Who in cells deep and lone have languished many a year.

XXXIII.

A dim and feeble joy, whose glimpses oft Were quenched in a relapse of wildering dreams;

Yet still methought we sailed, until aloft The stars of night grew pallid, and the beams Of morn descended on the ocean streams, And still that agèd man, so grand and mild, Tended me, even as some sick mother seems To hang in hope over a dying child,

Till in the azure East darkness again was piled.

XXXIV.

And then the night-wind steaming from the shore,

Sent odours dying sweet across the sea,
And the swift waves the little boat which bore,1
Were cut by its keen keel, though slantingly;
Soon I could hear the leaves sigh, and could

see

The myrtle blossoms starring the dim grove, As past the pebbly beach the boat did flee On sidelong wing, into a silent cove, Where ebon pines a shade under the starlight

wove.

CANTO FOURTH.

I.

THE old man took the oars, and soon the bark Smote on the beach beside a tower of stone; It was a crumbling heap, whose portal dark With blooming ivy trails was overgrown; Upon whose floor the spangling sands were strown,

And rarest sea-shells, which the eternal flood, Slave to the mother of the months, had thrown

Within the walls of that grey tower, which stood

A changeling of man's art, nursed amid Nature's brood.

II.

When the old man his boat had anchored,
He wound me in his arms with tender care,
And very few, but kindly words he said,

1 In Shelley's edition boat and waves had somehow changed places.-ED.

And bore me through the tower adown a stair,

Whose smooth descent some ceaseless step to

wear

For many a year had fallen. We came at last To a small chamber, which with mosses rare Was tapestried, where me his soft hands placed

Upon a couch of grass and oak-leaves interlaced.

III.

The moon was darting through the lattices Its yellow light, warm as the beams of daySo warm, that to admit the dewy breeze The old man opened them; the moonlight lay Upon a lake whose waters wove their play Even to the threshold of that lonely home: Within was seen in the dim wavering ray, The antique sculptured roof, and many a tome Whose lore had made that sage all that he had become.

IV.

The rock-built barrier of the sea was passed,-
And I was on the margin of a lake,

A lonely lake, amid the forests vast
And snowy mountains :-did my spirit wake
From sleep, as many-coloured as the snake
That girds eternity? in life and truth,

Might not my heart its cravings ever slake? Was Cythna then a dream, and all my youth, And all its hopes and fears, and all its joy and ruth?

V.

Thus madness came again—a milder mad

ness,

Which darkened naught but time's unquiet flow

With supernatural shades of clinging sad

ness;

That gentle Hermit, in my helpless woe,
By my sick couch was busy to and fro,
Like a strong spirit ministrant of good:
When I was healed, he led me forth to show
The wonders of his sylvan solitude,

And we together sate by that isle-fretted flood.

VI.

He knew his soothing words to weave with skill

From all my madness told; like mine own heart,

Of Cythna would he question me, until
That thrilling name had ceased to make me
start,

From his familiar lips-it was not art,
Of wisdom and of justice when he spoke-
When, 'mid soft looks of pity, there would
dart

A glance as keen as is the lightning's stroke When it doth rive the knots of some ancestral oak.

VII.

Thus slowly from my brain the darkness rolled,

My thoughts their due array did re-assume Through the enchantments of that Hermit old;

Then I bethought me of the glorious doom
Of those who sternly struggle to relume
The lamp of Hope o'er man's bewildered lot;
And, sitting by the waters, in the gloom

Of eve, to that friend's heart I told my thought

That heart which had grown old, but had corrupted not.

VIII.

That hoary man had spent his livelong age In converse with the dead, who leave the stamp

Of ever-burning thoughts on many a page, When they are gone into the senseless damp Of graves; his spirit thus became a lamp Of splendour, like to those on which it fed: Through peopled haunts, the city and the

camp,

Deep thirst for knowledge had his footsteps led,

And all the ways of men among mankind he

read.

IX.

But custom maketh blind and obdurate
The loftiest hearts :-he had beheld the woe
In which mankind was bound, but deemed
that fate,

Which made them abject, would preserve them so;

And in such faith, some steadfast joy to know, He sought this cell: but when fame went abroad,

That one in Argolis did undergo

Torture for liberty, and that the crowd High truths from gifted lips had heard and understood,

X.

And that the multitude was gathering wide, His spirit leaped within his agèd frame;