Mid thy herds and thy corn-fields secure thou hast

stood,

And join'd the wild yelling of famine and blood!
The nations curse thee! They with eager wondering
Shall hear Destruction, like a vulture, scream!
Strange-eyed Destruction! who with many a
dream

Of central fires through nether seas upthundering
Soothes her fierce solitude; yet as she lies
By living fount, or red volcanic stream,*
If ever to her lidless dragon-eyes,

O Albion! thy predestined ruins rise,

The fiend-hag on her perilous couch doth leap, Muttering distemper'd triumph in her charmed sleep.

Away, my soul, away!

In vain, in vain the birds of warning singAnd hark! I hear the famish'd brood of prey Flap their lank pennons on the groaning wind! Away, my soul, away!

I unpartaking of the evil thing,

With daily prayer and daily toil

Soliciting for food my scanty soil, t Have wail'd my country with a loud Lament. Now I recentre my immortal mind

Stretch'd on the marge of some fire-flashing fount

In the black chamber of a sulphur'd mount).—1796.

+ Soliciting my scant and blameless soil.—Ib.

N

In the deep sabbath of meek self-content ;* Cleansed from the vaporous passions † that bedim God's Image, sister of the Seraphim.‡

* In the long sabbath of high self-content.-1796.

In the deep sabbath of blest self-content.-1797.
In the blest sabbath of high self-content.-1803.
The fleshly passions.-1796.

The fears and anguish.—1797.

Cleansed from bedimming Fear, and Anguish weak and blind.-1803.

MISCELLANEOUS POEMS

(1794-1797).

MELANCHOLY.*

A FRAGMENT.

STRETCH'D on a moulder'd Abbey's broadest

wall,

Where ruining ivies propt the ruins steep— Her folded arms wrapping her tatter'd pall, Had Melancholy mused herself to sleep. The fern was press'd beneath her hair,

The dark green Adder's Tongue† was there; And still as past the flagging sea-gale weak, The long lank leaf bow'd fluttering o'er her cheek.

That pallid cheek was flush'd: her eager look
Beam'd eloquent in slumber! Inly wrought,
Imperfect sounds her moving lips forsook,
And her bent forehead work'd with troubled
thought.

Strange was the dream that fill'd her soul,
Nor did not whispering spirits roll

A mystic tumult, and a fateful rhyme
Mixt with wild shapings of the unborn time.

* First published in the Morning Chronicle, in the year 1794. [Note by S. T. C., 1817.]

† A botanical mistake. The plant I meant is called the Hart's Tongue; but this would unluckily spoil the poetical effect. Cedat ergo Botanice.