ALASTOR; OR, THE SPIRIT OF SOLITUDE. EARTH, Ocean, air, belovèd brotherhood! If our great Mother has imbued my soul Your love, and recompense the boon with mine; Mother of this unfathomable world! Of thy deep mysteries. I have made my bed Of what we are. In lone and silent hours, When night makes a weird sound of its own stillness, Staking his very life on some dark hope, Such magic as compels the charmèd night To render up thy charge: ... and, though ne'er yet Thou hast unveiled thy inmost sanctuary, Enough from incommunicable dream, And twilight phantasms, and deep noonday thought, Has shone within me, that serenely now And moveless, as a long-forgotten lyre Suspended in the solitary dome Of some mysterious and deserted fane, I wait thy breath, Great Parent, that my strain There was a Poet whose untimely tomb No human hands with pious reverence reared, But the charmed eddies of autumnal winds Built o'er his mouldering bones a pyramid Of mouldering leaves in the waste wilderness : A lovely youth, no mourning maiden decked With weeping flowers, or votive cypress wreath, The lone couch of his everlasting sleep :— Gentle, and brave, and generous, no lorn bard Breathed o'er his dark fate one melodious sigh: He lived, he died, he sung, in solitude. Strangers have wept to hear his passionate notes, And virgins, as unknown he past, have pined Locks its mute music in her rugged cell. By solemn vision, and bright silver dream, His infancy was nurtured. Every sight And sound from the vast earth and ambient air, Sent to his heart its choicest impulses. The fountains of divine philosophy Fled not his thirsting lips, and all of great, And knew. When early youth had past, he left To seek strange truths in undiscovered lands. Its fields of snow and pinnacles of ice With burning smoke, or where bitumen lakes To avarice or pride, their starry domes |