320

A DREAM.

IN visions of the dark night

I have dreamed of joy departed—
But a waking dream of life and light
Hath left me broken-hearted.

Ah! what is not a dream by day
To him whose eyes are cast
On things around him with a ray
Turned back upon the past?

That holy dream-that holy dream,
While all the world were chiding,

Hath cheered me as a lovely beam,
A lonely spirit guiding.

What though that light, thro' storm and night,

So trembled from afar

What could there be more purely bright
In Truth's day-star?

ROMANCE.

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.

Of late, eternal Condor years
So shake the very Heaven on high
With tumult as they thunder by,
I have no time for idle cares
Though gazing on the unquiet sky.
And when an hour with calmer wings
Its down upon my spirit flings-
That little time with lyre and rhyme
To while away-forbidden things!
My heart would feel to be a crime
Unless it trembled with the strings.

1829.

VOL. IV.

X

FAIRYLAND.

DIM vales-and shadowy floods-
And cloudy-looking woods,
Whose forms we can't discover
For the tears that drip all over
Huge moons there wax and wane-
Again-again-again-

Every moment of the night

For ever changing places

And they put out the star-light

With the breath from their pale faces.

About twelve by the moon-dial

One more filmy than the rest

(A kind which, upon trial,

They have found to be the best)

Comes down-still down-and down With its centre on the crown

Of a mountain's eminence,

While its wide circumference

In easy drapery falls

Over hamlets, over halls,

Wherever they may be

O'er the strange woods-o'er the sea

Over spirits on the wing

Over every drowsy thing—

And buries them up quite

In a labyrinth of light—

And then, how deep!-oh deep!

Is the passion of their sleep.

In the morning they arise,
And their moony covering
Is soaring in the skies,

With the tempests as they toss,
Like almost anything-

Or a yellow Albatross.

They use that moon no more
For the same end as before-
Videlicet a tent—

Which I think extravagant :
Its atomies, however,
Into a shower dissever,
Of which those butterflies,

Of Earth, who seek the skies,
And so come down again
(Never-contented things!)
Have brought a specimen
Upon their quivering wings.

1831.

THE LAKE. TO

In spring of youth it was my lot
To haunt of the wide world a spot
The which I could not love the less-
So lovely was the loneliness

Of a wild lake, with black rock bound,
And the tall pines that towered around.

But when the Night had thrown her pall
Upon that spot, as upon all,
And the mystic wind went by
Murmuring in melody—
Then-ah, then, I would awake
To the terror of the lone lake.

Yet that terror was not fright,
But a tremulous delight—
A feeling not the jewelled mine

Could teach or bribe me to define

Nor Love-although the Love were thine.

Death was in that poisonous wave,

And in its gulf a fitting grave