And I perceived no touch of change, No hint of death in all his frame,

But found him all in all the same, I should not feel it to be strange.

XV.

To night the winds began to rise
And roar from yonder dropping day:
The last red leaf is whirl'd away,
The rooks are blown about the skies;

The forest crack'd, the waters curl'd,
The cattle huddled on the lea;

And wildly dash'd on tower and tree The sunbeam strikes along the world :

And but for fancies, which aver

That all thy motions gently pass
Athwart a plane of molten glass,

I scarce could brook the strain and stir

That makes the barren branches loud;

And but for fear it is not so,

The wild unrest that lives in woe

Would dote and pore on yonder cloud

That rises upward always higher,

And onward drags a labouring breast,

And topples round the dreary west, A looming bastion fringed with fire.

XVI.

WHAT words are these have fall'n from me?

Can calm despair and wild unrest

Be tenants of a single breast,

Or sorrow such a changeling be?

Or doth she only seem to take

The touch of change in calm or storm;

But knows no more of transient form In her deep self, than some dead lake

That holds the shadow of a lark

Hung in the shadow of a heaven? Or has the shock, so harshly given, Confus'd me like the unhappy bark

That strikes by night a craggy shelf,

And staggers blindly ere she sink?

And stunn'd me from my power to think

And all my knowledge of myself;

And made me that delirious man

Whose fancy fuses old and new,

And flashes into false and true,

And mingles all without a plan?