Obrazy na stronie
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All this is beautiful in every land.

But what see you beside? -a shabby stand
Of Hackney coaches-a brick house or wall
Fencing some lonely court, white with the
scrawl

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;-
Or yellow-haired Pollonia, murmuring
To Henry some unutterable thing.

270

I see a chaos of green leaves and fruit
Built round dark caverns, even to the root
Of the living stems that feed them-in whose
bowers

There sleep in their dark dew the folded flowers;
Beyond, the surface of the unsickled corn
Trembles not in the slumbering air, and, borne
In circles quaint, and ever-changing dance, 280
Like winged stars the fire-flies flash and glance,
Pale in the open moonshine; but each one
Under the dark trees seems a little sun,
A meteor tamed, a fixed star gone astray
From the silver regions of the milky way;
Afar the Contadino's song is heard,
Rude, but made sweet by distance--and a bird
Which cannot be the Nightingale, and yet
I know none else that sings so sweet as it
At this late hour;-and then all is still-
Now Italy or London, which you will!

Next winter you must pass with

have

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me; I'll

My house by that time turned into a grave
Of dead despondence and low-thoughted care,
And all the dreams which our tormentors are;

Oh! that Hunt, Hogg, Peacock and Smith were there,

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With every thing belonging to them fair!-
We will have books, Spanish, Italian, Greek;
And ask one week to make another week
As like his father as I'm unlike mine,
Which is not his fault, as you may divine.
Though we eat little flesh and drink no wine,
Yet let's be merry: we'll have tea and toast,
Custards for supper, and an endless host
Of syllabubs and jellies and mince-pies,
And other such lady-like luxuries,-
Feasting on which we will philosophize!
And we'll have fires out of the Grand Duke's
wood,

To thaw the six weeks' winter in our blood.
And then we'll talk ;--what shall we talk

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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."

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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,
Serene as thine, which lent it life awhile.

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
That any thing of mine is fit to live!

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
As Ruth or Lucy, whom his graceful praise
Clothes for our grandsons-but she matches
Peter,

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
Incestuous Change bore to her father Time,
Error and Truth, had hunted from the Earth
All those bright natures which adorned its
prime,

And left us nothing to believe in, worth
The pains of putting into learnèd rhyme,
A lady-witch there lived on Atlas' mountain
Within a cavern, by a secret fountain.

II.

Her mother was one of the Atlantides:
The all-beholding Sun had ne'er beholden
In his wide voyage o'er continents and seas
So fair a creature, as she lay enfolden
In the warm shadow of her loveliness ;-

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