All this is beautiful in every land. But what see you beside? -a shabby stand Of our unhappy politics;—or worse-— A wretched woman reeling by, whose curse Mixed with the watchman's, partner of her trade, You must accept in place of serenade;- 270 I see a chaos of green leaves and fruit There sleep in their dark dew the folded flowers; Next winter you must pass with have 291 me; I'll My house by that time turned into a grave Oh! that Hunt, Hogg, Peacock and Smith were there, 300 With every thing belonging to them fair!- To thaw the six weeks' winter in our blood. 310 about? Oh! there are themes enough for many a bout Of thought-entangled descant ;- -as to nervesWith cones and parallelograms and curves I've sworn to strangle them if once they dare To bother me-when you are with me there. And they shall never more sip laudanum, From Helicon or Himeros; '—well, come; And, in despite of God and of the devil, We'll make our friendly philosophic revel Outlast the leafless time; till buds and flowers Warn the obscure inevitable hours, Sweet meeting by sad parting to renew ;"To-morrow to fresh woods and pastures new." 321 1 "luscos, from which the river Himera was named, is, with some slight shade of difference, a synonym of Love. THE WITCH OF ATLAS. TO MARY, ON HER OBJECTING TO THE FOLLOWING POEM, UPON THE SCORE OF ITS CONTAINING NO HUMAN INTEREST. I. How, my dear Mary, are you critic-bitten, (For vipers kill, though dead,) by some review, That you condemn these verses I have written, Because they tell no story, false or true! What, though no mice are caught by a young kitten, May it not leap and play as grown cats do, Till its claws come? Prithee, for this one time, Content thee with a visionary rhyme. II. What hand would crush the silken-winged fly, The youngest of inconstant April's minions, Because it cannot climb the purest sky, Where the swan sings, amid the sun's dominions? Not thine. Thou knowest 'tis its doom to die, When day shall hide within her twilight pinions 200 LINES TO MARY ON THE WITCH OF ATLAS. The lucent eyes and the eternal smile, III. To thy fair feet a winged Vision1 came, Whose date should have been longer than a day, And o'er thy head did beat its wings for fame, And in thy sight its fading plumes display; The watery bow burned in the evening flame, But the shower fell, the swift sun went his way And that is dead.- -O, let me not believe IV. Wordsworth informs us he was nineteen years Considering and retouching Peter Bell; Watering his laurels with the killing tears Of slow, dull care, so that their roots to hell Might pierce, and their wide branches blot the spheres Of heaven, with dewy leaves and flowers; this well May be, for Heaven and Earth conspire to foil The over-busy gardener's blundering toil. V. My Witch indeed is not so sweet a creature Though he took nineteen years, and she three days In dressing. Light the vest of flowing metre 1 Laon and Cythna, also dedicated to Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley.-ED. She wears; he, proud as dandy with his stays, Has hung upon his wiry limbs a dress Like King Lear's "looped and windowed raggedness." VI. If you strip Peter, you will see a fellow, Scorched by Hell's hyperequatorial climate Into a kind of a sulphureous yellow: A lean mark, hardly fit to fling a rhyme at; In shape a Scaramouch, in hue Othello. If you unveil my Witch, no priest nor primate Can shrive you of that sin,-if sin there be In love, when it becomes idolatry. THE WITCH OF ATLAS. I. BEFORE those cruel Twins, whom at one birth And left us nothing to believe in, worth II. Her mother was one of the Atlantides: |