My thoughts, and bid you look upon the night :
As water does a sponge, so the moonlight
Fills the void, hollow, universal air.
What see you?-Unpavilioned heaven is fair,
Whether the moon, into her chamber gone,
Leaves midnight to the golden stars, or wan
Climbs with diminished beams the azure steep;
Or whether clouds sail o'er the inverse deep,
Piloted by the many-wandering blast,
And the rare stars rush through them, dim and fast.
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.
I see a chaos of green leaves and fruit
Built round dark caverns, even to the root
Of the living stems who feed them; in whose
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,
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 a 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 me; I'll have
My house by that turned into a grave
Of dead despondence and low-thoughted care,
And all the dreams which our tormentors are.
O that Hunt and
were there,
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.
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, [wood,
And we'll have fires out of the Grand Duke's
To thaw the six weeks' winter in our blood.
And then we'll talk ;-what shall we talk about?
Oh! there are themes enough for many a bout
Of thought-entangled descant; as to nerves-
With 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 spite of *** 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."
ON HER OBJECTING TO THE FOLLOWING POEM UPON
THE SCORE OF ITS CONTAINING NO HUMAN INTEREST.
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!
*Iuɛpos, from which the river Himera was named, is, with some slight shade of difference, a synoyme of Love.
What, though no mice are caught by a young
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.
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
The lucent eyes, and the eternal smile,
Serene as thine, which lent it life awhile.
To thy fair feet a winged Vision 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
And that is dead.-O, let me not believe
That any thing of mine is fit to live!
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;
May be, for Heaven and Earth conspire to foil The over-busy gardener's blundering toil.
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
In dressing. Light the vest of flowing metre
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."
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;
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