And thistles, and nettles, and darnels rank,
And the dock, and henbane, and hemlock dank,
Stretch'd out its long and hollow shank,
And stifled the air till the dead wind stank.

And plants, at whose names the verse feels loath, Filled the place with a monstrous undergrowth, Prickly, and pulpous, and blistering, and blue, Livid, and starred with a lurid dew.

And agarics and fungi, with mildew and mould, Started like mist from the wet ground cold; Pale, fleshy, as if the decaying dead

With a spirit of growth had been animated!

Spawn, weeds, and filth, a leprous scum,
Made the running rivulet thick and dumb,
And at its outlet, flags huge as stakes
Dammed it up with roots knotted like water-
snakes.

And hour by hour, when the air was still,
The vapours arose, which have strength to kill :
At morn they were seen, at noon they were felt,
At night they were darkness no star could melt.

And unctuous meteors from spray to spray
Crept and flitted in broad noon-day
Unseen; every branch on which they alit
By a venomous blight was burned and bit.

The Sensitive Plant, like one forbid,
Wept, and the tears within each lid
Of its folded leaves which together grew,
Were changed to a blight of frozen glue.

For the leaves soon fell, and the branches soon By the heavy axe of the blast were hewn ;

The shrank to the root through every pore,

sap

As blood to a heart that will beat no more.

For Winter came: the wind was his whip;
One choppy finger was on his lip:

He had torn the cataracts from the hills,
And they clanked at his girdle like manacles;

His breath was a chain which without a sound The earth, and the air, and the water bound; He came, fiercely driven in his chariot-throne By the tenfold blasts of the arctic zone.

Then the weeds which were forms of living death,
Fled from the frost to the earth beneath :
Their decay and sudden flight from frost
Was but like the vanishing of a ghost!

And under the roots of the Sensitive Plant
The moles and the dormice died for want:
The birds dropped stiff from the frozen air,
And were caught in the branches naked and
bare.

First there came down a thawing rain,

And its dull drops froze on the boughs again,
Then there steamed up a freezing dew
Which to the drops of the thaw-rain grew;

And a northern whirlwind, wandering about
Like a wolf that had smelt a dead child out,
Shook the boughs thus laden, and heavy and stiff,
And snapped them off with his rigid griff.

When winter had gone and spring came back,
The Sensitive Plant was a leafless wreck;
But the mandrakes, and toadstools, and docks and
darnels,

Rose like the dead from their ruined charnels.

CONCLUSION.

WHETHER the Sensitive Plant, or that
Which within its boughs like a spirit sat,
Ere its outward form had known decay,
Now felt this change, I cannot say.

Whether that lady's gentle mind,
No longer with the form combined
Which scattered love, as stars do light,
Found sadness, where it left delight,

I dare not guess; but in this life
Of error, ignorance and strife,
Where nothing is, but all things seem,
And we the shadows of the dream,

It is a modest creed, and yet
Pleasant, if one considers it,
To own that death itself must be,
Like all the rest, a mockery.

That garden sweet, that lady fair,
And all sweet shapes and odours there,
In truth have never passed away:

'Tis we, 'tis ours, are changed! not they.

For love, and beauty, and delight,
There is no death nor change; their might
Exceeds our organs, which endure
No light, being themselves obscure.

A VISION OF THE SEA.

'Tis the terror of tempest. The rags of the sail Are flickering in ribbons within the fierce gale: From the stark night of vapours the dim rain is driven,

And when lightning is loosed like a deluge from

heaven,

She sees the black trunks of the water-spouts spin, And bend, as if heaven was ruining in,

Which they seemed to sustain with their terrible

mass

As if ocean had sunk from beneath them: they pass To their graves in the deep with an earthquake of sound,

And the waves and the thunders, made silent

around,

Leave the wind to its echo. The vessel, now tossed

Through the low trailing rack of the tempest, is lost In the skirts of the thunder-cloud: now down the

sweep

Of the wind-cloven wave to the chasm of the deep
It sinks, and the walls of the watery vale
Whose depths of dread calm are unmoved by the
gale,

Dim mirrors of ruin, hang gleaming about;
While the surf, like a chaos of stars, like a rout
Of death-flames, like whirlpools of fire-flowing iron,
With splendour and terror the black ship environ;
Or like sulphur-flakes hurled from a mine of
pale fire,

In fountains spout o'er it. In many a spire
The pyramid-billows, with white points of brine,
In the cope of the lightning inconstantly shine,
As piercing the sky from the floor of the sea.