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tion to some longer one. The stanza on the preceding page is almost a literal translation from Dante's famous canzone

Voi che intendendo il terzo ciel movete, &c.

The presumptuous application of the concluding lines to his own composition will raise a smile at the expense of my unfortunate friend: be it a smile not of contempt, but pity,

EPIPSYCHIDION.

SWEET Spirit, sister of that orphan one
Whose empire is the name thou weepest on,
In my heart's temple I suspend to thee
These votive wreaths of withered memory.
Poor captive bird, who from thy narrow cage
Pourest such music that it might assuage
The rugged hearts of those who prisoned thee,
Were they not deaf to all sweet melody,-
This song shall be thy rose: its petals pale
Are dead, indeed, my adored nightingale!
But soft and fragrant is the faded blossom,
And it has no thorn left to wound thy bosom.
High spirit-winged heart, who dost for ever
Beat thine unfeeling bars with vain endeavour,
Till those bright plumes of thought in which arrayed
It oversoared this low and worldly shade
Lie shattered, and thy panting wounded breast
Stains with dear blood its unmaternal nest, -
I weep vain tears: blood would less bitter be,
Yet poured forth gladlier could it profit thee.
Seraph of heaven, too gentle to be human,
Veiling beneath that radiant form of Woman
All that is insupportable in thee

Of light and love and immortality!
Sweet benediction in the eternal curse!
Veiled glory of this lampless universe! .

Thou moon beyond the clouds! thou living form
Among the dead! thou star above the storm!
Thou wonder, and thou beauty, and thou terror!
Thou harmony of Nature's art! thou mirror
In whom, as in the splendour of the sun,
All shapes look glorious which thou gazest on,—
Ay, even the dim words which obscure thee now
Flash lightning-like with unaccustomed glow!
I pray thee that thou blot from this sad song
All of its much mortality and wrong

With those clear drops which start like sacred dew
From the twin lights thy sweet soul darkens through,
Weeping till sorrow becomes ecstacy:

Then smile on it so that it may not die.

I never thought before my death to see
Youth's vision thus made perfect. Emily,

--

I love thee, though the world by no thin name
Will hide that love from its unvalued shame.

Would we two had been twins of the same mother!
Or that the name my heart lent to another
Could be a sister's bond for her and thee,
Blending two beams of one eternity!
Yet, were one lawful and the other true,

These names, though dear, could paint not as is due
How beyond refuge I am thine.

Ah me!

I am not thine-I am a part of thee!

Sweet lamp! my moth-like muse has burnt its wings; Or, like a dying swan who soars and sings,

Young Love should teach Time, in his own grey style, All that thou art. Art thou not void of guile

A lovely soul formed to be blessed and bless

A well of sealed and secret happiness,

Whose waters like blithe light and music are,
Vanquishing dissonance and gloom-a star
Which moves not in the moving heavens, alone--
A smile amid dark frowns-a gentle tone
Amid rude voices-a beloved light-

A solitude, a refuge, a delight

A lute which those whom Love has taught to play
Make music on to soothe the roughest day,
And lull fond Grief asleep-a buried treasure--
A cradle of young thoughts of wingless pleasure-
A violet-shrouded grave of woe?—I measure
The world of fancies, seeking one like thee,
And find-alas! mine own infirmity.

She met me, Stranger, upon life's rough way,

And lured me towards sweet death; as Night by Day,
Winter by Spring, or Sorrow by swift Hope,
Led into light, life, peace. An antelope
In the suspended impulse of its lightness
Were less etherially light. The brightness
Of her divinest presence trembles through
Her limbs, as underneath a cloud of dew
Embodied in the windless heaven of June,
Amid the splendour-winged stars, the moon
Burns inextinguishably beautiful :

And from her lips, as from a hyacinth full
Of honey-dew, a liquid murmur drops,
Killing the sense with passion, sweet as stops
Of planetary music heard in trance.
In her mild lights the starry spirits dance,
The sunbeams of those wells which ever leap
Under the lightnings of the soul-too deep
For the brief fathom-line of thought or sense.

The glory of her being, issuing thence,

Stains the dead blank cold air with a warm shade
Of unentangled intermixture, made,

By Love, of light and motion; one intense
Diffusion, one serene omnipresence,

Whose flowing outlines mingle in their flowing,
Around her cheeks and utmost fingers glowing
With the unintermitted blood, which there
Quivers (as in a fleece of snow-like air
The crimson pulse of living Morn may quiver),
Continuously prolonged and ending never,
Till they are lost, and in that beauty furled
Which penetrates and clasps and fills the world;
Scarce visible from extreme loveliness.

Warm fragrance seems to fall from her light dress,
And her loose hair; and, where some heavy tress
The air of her own speed has disentwined,
The sweetness seems to satiate the faint wind;
And in the soul a wild odour is felt,

Beyond the sense, like fiery dews that melt

Into the bosom of a frozen bud.

See where she stands ! a mortal shape indued
With love and life and light and deity,

And motion which may change but cannot die;
An image of some bright eternity;

A shadow of some golden dream; a splendour
Leaving the third sphere pilotless; a tender
Reflection of the eternal moon of love

Under whose motions life's dull billows move;
A metaphor of Spring and youth and morning;
A vision like incarnate April, warning

With smiles and tears Frost the anatomy
Into his summer grave.

Ah! woe is me!

What have I dared? where am I lifted? how
Shall I descend, and perish not? I know
That love makes all things equal: I have heard
By mine own heart this joyous truth averred,-
The spirit of the worm beneath the sod,
In love and worship, blends itself with God.

O too late

Spouse! sister! angel! pilot of the fate
Whose course has been so starless!
Beloved, O too soon adored, by me!
For in the fields of immortality

My spirit should at first have worshiped thine,
A divine presence in a place divine;

Or should have moved beside it on this earth,
A shadow of that substance, from its birth:
But not as now. -I love thee; yes, I feel
That on the fountain of my heart a seal

Is set, to keep its waters pure and bright
For thee, since in those tears thou hast delight.
We are we not formed, as notes of music are,
For one another, though dissimilar?

Such difference without discord as can make
Those sweetest sounds in which all spirits shake,
As trembling leaves in a continuous air.

Thy wisdom speaks in me, and bids me dare
Beacon the rocks on which high hearts are wrecked.

I never was attached to that great sect

Whose doctrine is that each one should select

Out of the crowd a mistress or a friend,

And all the rest, though fair and wise, commend
To cold oblivion; though it is in the code
Of modern morals, and the beaten road

Which those poor slaves with weary footsteps tread
Who travel to their home among the dead
By the broad highway of the world, and so
With one chained friend, perhaps a jealous foe,
The dreariest and the longest journey go.

True love in this differs from gold and clay,
That to divide is not to take away.
Love is like understanding, that grows bright,
Gazing on many truths; 'tis like thy light,
Imagination, which from earth and sky,
And from the depths of human fantasy,
As from a thousand prisms and mirrors, fills
The universe with glorious beams, and kills
Error the worm with many a sunlike arrow
Of its reverberated lightning. Narrow
The heart that loves, the brain that contemplates,
The life that wears, the spirit that creates,
One object and one form, and builds thereby
A sepulchre for its eternity!

Mind from its object differs most in this :
Evil from good; misery from happiness;
The baser from the nobler; the impure
And frail from what is clear and must endure.
If you divide suffering or dross, you may
Diminish till it is consumed away;

If you divide pleasure and love and thought,
Each part exceeds the whole; and we know not
How much, while any yet remains unshared,
Of pleasure may be gained, of sorrow spared.
This truth is that deep well whence sages draw
The unenvied light of hope; the eternal law
By which those live to whom this world of life
Is as a garden ravaged, and whose strife
Tills for the promise of a later birth
The wilderness of this elysian earth.

There was a Being whom my spirit oft
Met on its visioned wanderings, far aloft,
In the clear golden prime of my youth's dawn,
Upon the fairy isles of sunny lawn,

Amid the enchanted mountains, and the caves
Of divine sleep, and on the air-like waves
Of wonder-level dream, whose tremulous floor
Paved her light steps. On an imagined shore,
Under the grey beak of some promontory,
She met me, robed in such exceeding glory
That I beheld her not. In solitudes

Her voice came to me through the whispering woods,
And from the fountains, and the odours deep

Of flowers, which, like lips murmuring in their sleep
Of the sweet kisses which had lulled them there,
Breathed but of her to the enamoured air;
And from the breezes whether low or loud,
And from the rain of every passing cloud,
And from the singing of the summer birds,
And from all sounds, all silence. In the words
Of antique verse and high romance—in form,
Sound, colour-in whatever checks that storm
Which with the shattered present chokes the past-
And in that best philosophy whose taste

Makes this cold common hell, our life, a doom
As glorious as a fiery martyrdom-

Her Spirit was the harmony of truth.

Then from the caverns of my dreamy youth
I sprang, as one sandalled with plumes of fire,
And towards the lodestar of my one desire
I flitted, like a dizzy moth whose flight

Is as a dead leaf's in the owlet light,

When it would seek in Hesper's setting sphere
A radiant death, a fiery sepulchre,

As if it were a lamp of earthly flame.

But she, whom prayers or tears then could not tame,
Passed, like a God throned on a winged planet,
Whose burning plumes to tenfold swiftness fan it,
Into the dreary cone of our life's shade.

And, as a man with mighty loss dismayed,

I would have followed, though the grave between
Yawned like a gulf whose spectres are unseen:
When a voice said, "O thou of hearts the weakest,
The phantom is beside thee whom thou seekest."

Then I-"Where?" The world's echo answered "where?"

And in that silence and in my despair

I questioned every tongueless wind that flew

Over my tower of mourning, if it knew

Whither 'twas fled, this soul out of my soul;

And murmured names and spells which have control

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