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Whom the astonished people saw Striding o'er empires haughtily

A diademed outlaw

XVIII.

O human love! thou spirit given,
On earth, of all we hope in heaven!
Which fall'st into the soul like rain
Upon the Siroc-withered plain,
And, failing in thy power to bless,
But leav'st the heart a wilderness !

Idea! which bindest life around

With music of so strange a sound

A beauty of so wild a birth

Farewell for I have won the Earth.

XIX.

When Hope, the eagle that towered, could see

No cliff beyond him in the sky,

His pinions were bent droopingly—

And homeward turned his softened eye.

'Twas sunset: when the sun will part

There comes a sullenness of heart

To him who still would look upon

The glory of the summer sun.
That soul will hate the ev'ning mist

So often lovely, and will list

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To the sound of the coming darkness (known

To those whose spirits hearken) as one

Who, in a dream of night, would fly

But cannot, from a danger nigh.

XX.

What tho' the moon-the white moon
Shed all the splendour of her noon,
Her smile is chilly-and her beam,
In that time of dreariness, will seem
(So like you gather in your breath
A portrait taken after death.
And boyhood is a summer sun
Whose waning is the dreariest one—

For all we live to know is known,
And all we seek to keep hath flown-

Let life, then, as the day-flower, fall

With the noon-day beauty—which is all.

XXI.

I reached my home-my home no more-
For all had flown who made it so.

I passed from out its mossy door,

And, tho' my tread was soft and low,

A voice came from the threshold stone
Of one whom I had earlier known-

O, I defy thee, Hell, to show

On beds of fire that burn below,

An humbler heart-a deeper woe.

XXII.

Father, I firmly do believe

I know for Death who comes for me

From regions of the blest afar,

Where there is nothing to deceive,
Hath left his iron gate ajar,

And rays of truth you cannot see
Are flashing thro' Eternity—————
I do believe that Eblis hath

A snare in every human path-
Else how, when in the holy grove
I wandered of the idol, Love,
Who daily scents his snowy wings
With incense of burnt offerings
From the most unpolluted things,

Whose pleasant bowers are yet so riven
Above with trellised rays from Heaven
No mote may shun-no tiniest fly-

The lightning of his eagle eye-
How was it that Ambition crept,
Unseen, amid the revels there,

Till, growing bold, he laughed and leapt
In the tangles of Love's very hair?

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