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XVIII.

THE day is gone, and all its sweets are gone! Sweet voice, sweet lips, soft hand, and softer breast,

Warm breath, light whisper, tender semitone,

Bright eyes, accomplish'd shape, and lang'rous

waist!

Faded the flower and all its budded charms,

Faded the sight of beauty from my eyes,
Faded the shape of beauty from my arms,
Faded the voice, warmth, whiteness, paradise!
Vanish'd unseasonably at shut of eve,
When the dusk holiday- or holinight

Of fragrant-curtain'd love begins to weave
The woof of darkness thick, for hid delight:
But, as I've read love's missal through to-day,
He'll let me sleep, seeing I fast and pray.

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Merciful love that tantalizes not,

One-thoughted, never-wandering, guileless love, Unmask'd, and being seen

without a blot !

O! let me have thee whole,-all-all-be mine! That shape, that fairness, that sweet minor zest Of love, your kiss, those hands, those eyes

divine,

--

That warm, white, lucent, million-pleasured

breast,

Yourself - your soul

-in pity give me all,

Withhold no atom's atom, or I die,
Or living on perhaps, your wretched thrall,
Forget, in the mist of idle misery,
Life's purposes-the palate of my mind
Losing its gust, and my ambition blind!

1819.

XX.

KEATS'S LAST SONNET.

BRIGHT star, would I were steadfast as thou art! Not in lone splendor hung aloft the night, And watching, with eternal lids apart,

Like Nature's patient sleepless Eremite, The moving waters at their priestlike task Of pure ablution round earth's human shores, Or gazing on the new soft fallen mask

Of snow upon the mountains and the moors: No yet still steadfast, still unchangeable, Pillow'd upon my fair love's ripening breast, To feel forever its soft fall and swell,

Awake forever in a sweet unrest,
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live ever - or else swoon to death.*

* Another reading:—

Half-passionless, and so swoon on to death.

THE END.

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