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INTRODUCTION.

ROMANCE, who loves to nod and sing, With drowsy head and folded wing, Among the green leaves as they shake Far down within some shadowy lake, To me a painted paroquet

Hath been-a most familiar bird

Taught me my alphabet to say-
To lisp my very earliest word
While in the wild-wood I did lie,
A child-with a most knowing eye.

Succeeding years, too wild for song,
Then roll'd like tropic storms along,

Where, tho' the garish lights that fly
Dying along the troubled sky,

Lay bare, thro' vistas thunder-riven,

The blackness of the general Heaven,
That very blackness yet doth fling
Light on the lightning's silver wing.

For being an idle boy lang syne,
Who read Anacreon, and drank wine,
I early found Anacreon rhymes
Were almost passionate sometimes—
And by strange alchemy of brain

His pleasures always turn'd to pain

His naïveté to wild desire

His wit to love-his wine to fire

And so, being young and dipt in folly,

I fell in love with melancholy,

And used to throw my earthly rest

And quiet all away in jest—

I could not love except where Death

Was mingling his with Beauty's breath

Or Hymen, Time, and Destiny
Were stalking between her and me.

O, then the eternal Condor years
So shook the very Heavens on high,
With tumult as they thunder'd by:
I had no time for idle cares,
Thro' gazing on the unquiet sky!
Or if an hour with calmed wing
Its down did on my spirit fling,
That little hour with lyre and rhyme
To while away-forbidden thing!

My heart half fear'd to be a crime
Unless it trembled with the string.

But now my soul hath too much roomGone are the glory and the gloomThe black hath mellow'd into gray,

And all the fires are fading away.

My draught of passion hath been deepI revell'd, and I now would sleep

And after-drunkenness of soul

Succeeds the glories of the bowl-
An idle longing night and day

To dream my very life away.

But dreams of those who dream as I,
Aspiringly, are damned, and die :

Yet should I swear I moan alone,
By notes so very shrilly blown,
To break upon Time's monotone,
While yet my vapid joy and grief
Are tintless of the yellow leaf-
Why not an imp the graybeard hath,
Will shake his shadow in my path-
And even the graybeard will o'erlook
Connivingly my dreaming-book.

THE DOOMED CITY.

Lo! Death hath reared himself a throne

In a strange city, all alone,

Far down within the dim West

And the good, and the bad, and the worst, and the best,

Heaven gave to their eternal rest.

There shrines, and palaces, and towers

Are not like anything of ours—

O! no

-O! no-ours never loom

To heaven with that ungodly gloom!

Time-eaten towers that tremble not!

Around, by lifting winds forgot,

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