IX.

On the Grasshopper and Cricket.

THE poetry of earth is never dead :

When all the birds are faint with the hot sun,

And hide in cooling trees, a voice will run

From hedge to hedge about the new-mown mead;
That is the Grasshopper's

he takes the lead

In summer luxury, he has never done

With his delights; for when tired out with fun He rests at ease beneath some pleasant weed. The poetry of earth is ceasing never:

On a lone winter evening, when the frost

Has wrought a silence, from the stove there shrills The Cricket's song, in warmth increasing ever, And seems to one in drowsiness half lost,

The Grasshopper's among some grassy hills.

December 30, 1816.

5

ΙΟ

X.

As from the darkening gloom a silver dove
Upsoars, and darts into the eastern light,
On pinions that naught moves but pure delight,
So fled thy soul into the realms above,
Regions of peace and everlasting love;

Where happy spirits, crown'd with circlets bright
Of starry beam, and gloriously bedight,
Taste the high joy none but the blest can prove.
There thou or joinest the immortal quire

In melodies that even heaven fair
Fill with superior bliss, or, at desire,

Of the omnipotent Father, clear'st the air

On holy message sent - What pleasure 's higher?
Wherefore does any grief our joy impair?

XI.

Written on a Blank Space at the end of Chaucer's Tale of
"The Floure and the Lefe."

THIS pleasant tale is like a little copse:
The honied lines so freshly interlace
To keep the reader in so sweet a place,
So that he here and there full-hearted stops;
And oftentimes he feels the dewy drops

Come cool and suddenly against his face,
And by the wandering melody may trace
Which way the tender-legged linnet hops.
Oh, what a power has white simplicity!

What mighty power has this gentle story!
I that do ever feel a thirst for glory,
Could at this moment be content to lie

Meekly upon the grass, as those whose sobbings
Were heard of none beside the mournful robins.

XII.

On the Sea.

It keeps eternal whisperings around

Desolate shores, and with its mighty swell Gluts twice ten thousand caverns, till the spell Of Hecate leaves them their old shadowy sound. Often 'tis in such gentle temper found

That scarcely will the very smallest shell

Be mov'd for days from whence it sometime fell,
When last the winds of heaven were unbound.
Oh, ye, who have your eye-balls vex'd and tir'd,
Feast them upon the wideness of the sea;

5

IO

O, ye, whose ears are dinn'd with uproar rude, Or fed too much with cloying melody,

Sit ye near some old cavern's mouth, and brood Until ye start, as if the sea-nymphs quir'd!

XIII.

To Homer.

STANDING aloof in giant ignorance,

Of thee I hear and of the Cyclades,
As one who sits ashore and longs perchance
To visit dolphin-corals in deep seas.

So thou wast blind; but then the veil was rent,

For Jove uncurtain'd Heaven to let thee live,

And Neptune made for thee a spumy tent,
And Pan made sing for thee his forest-hive;
Aye on the shores of darkness there is light,
And precipices show untrodden green,
There is a budding morrow in midnight,

There is a triple sight in blindness keen;
Such seeing hadst thou, as it once befel
To Dian, Queen of Earth, and Heaven and Hell.

5

ΙΟ

XIV.

To a Lady Seen for a few Moments at Vauxhall. TIME's sea hath been five years at its slow ebb, Long hours have to and fro let creep the sand, Since I was tangled in thy beauty's web,

And snared by the ungloving of thine hand. And yet I never look on midnight sky

But I behold thine eyes' well-memory'd light;

I cannot look upon the rose's dye

But to thy cheek my soul doth take its flight;

5

I cannot look on any budding flower
But my fond ear, in fancy at thy lips.
And harkening for a love-sound, doth devour

Its sweets in the wrong sense.

Thou dost eclipse

Every delight with sweet remembering,

And grief unto my darling joys dost bring.

XV.

"When I have Fears."

WHEN I have fears that I may cease to be
Before my pen has glean'd my teeming brain,
Before high piled books, in charact❜ry,

Hold like rich garners the full-ripen'd grain;
When I behold, upon the night's starr'd face,
Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,
And think that I may never live to trace

Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance;

And when I feel, fair creature of an hour!
That I shall never look upon thee more,
Never have relish in the faery power

Of unreflecting love! - then on the shore
Of the wide world I stand alone, and think
Till love and fame to nothingness do sink.

XVI.

"Bright Star!"

BRIGHT star! would I were steadfast as thou art

Not in lone splendour 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,

10

5

IO

5

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 for ever its soft fall and swell,

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

ΙΟ