O, human love! thou spirit given,
On Earth, of all we hope in Heaven!
Which fall'st into the soul like rain
Upon the Siroc-wither'd plain,
And, failing in thy power to bless,
But leav'st the heart a wilderness!
Idea! which bindest life around
With music of so strange a sound
And beauty of so wild a birth-
Farewell! for I have won the Earth.
When Hope, the eagle that tower'd, could see
No cliff beyond him in the sky,
His pinions were bent droopingly—
And homeward turn'd his soften'd eye.
"Twas sunset: when the sun will part
There comes a sullenness of heart
To him who still would look upon
The glory of the summer sun.
That soul will hate the ev'ning mist
So often lovely, and will list
To the sound of the coming darkness (know?
To those whose spirits harken) as one
Who, in a dream of night, would fly
But cannot from a danger nigh.
What tho' the moon-the white moor
Shed all the splendor of her noon,
Her smile is chilly-and her beam,
In that time of dreariness, will seem
(So like you gather in your breath)
A portrait taken after death.
And boyhood is a summer suu
Whose waning is the dreariest one—
For all we live to know is known
And all we seek to keep hath flown-
Let life, then, as the day-flower, fall
With the noon-day beauty-which is all.
I reach'd my home-my home no more—
For all had flown who made it so.
I pass'd from out its mossy door,
And, tho' my tread was soft and low,
A voice came from the threshold stone
Of one whom I had earlier known-
O, I defy thee, Hell, to show
On beds of fire that burn below,
An humbler heart-a deeper wo.
Father, I firmly do believe
I know for Death who comes for me
From regions of the blest afar,
Where there is nothing to deceive,
Hath left his iron gate ajar,
And rays of truth you cannot see
Are flashing thro' Eternity-
I do believe that Eblis hath
A snare in every human path-
Else how, when in the holy grove
I wandered of the idol, Love,
Who daily scents his snowy wings
With incense of burnt offerings
From the most unpolluted things,
Whose pleasant bowers are yet so riven
Above with trellic'd rays from Heaven
No mote may shun-no tiniest fly-
The light'ning of his eagle eye-
How was it that Ambition crept,
Unseen, amid the revels there,
Till growing bold, he laughed and leapt
In the tangles of Love's very hair?
THE bowers whereat, in dreams, I see
The wantonest singing birds,
Are lips and all thy melody
Of lip-begotten words
Thine eyes, in Heaven of heart enshrined
Then desolately fall,
O God! on my funereal mind
Like starlight on a pall—
Thy heart-thy heart!-I wake and sigh, And sleep to dream till day
Of the truth that gold can never buy— Of the baubles that it may.
IN visions of the dark night
I have dreamed of joy departedBut a waking dream of life and light Hath left me broken-hearted.
Ah! what is not a dream by day
To him whose eyes are cast
On things around him with a ray
Turned back upon the past?
That holy dream-that holy dream,
While all the world were chiding,
Hath cheered me as a lovely beam
A lonely spirit guiding.
What though that light, thro' storm and night,
So trembled from afar
What could there be more purely bright
In Truth's day-star ?
ROMANCE, who loves to nod and sing,
With drowsy head and folded wing,
Among the green leaves as they shake
Far down within some shadowy lake,
To me a painted paroquet
Hath been-a most familiar bird-
Taught me my alphabet to say—
To lisp my very earliest word
While in the wild wood I did lie,
A child-with a most knowing eye.
Of late, eternal Condor years
So shake the very Heaven on high
With tumult as they thunder by,
I have no time for idle cares
Through gazing on the unquiet sky.
And when an hour with calmer wings
Its down upon my spirit flings-
That little time with lyre and rhyme
To while away-forbidden things!
My heart would feel to be a crime
Unless it trembled with the strings.
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