I have sent books and music there, and all Those instruments with which high spirits call The future from its cradle, and the past
Out of its grave, and make the present last In thoughts and joys which sleep, but cannot die, Folded within their own eternity.
Our simple life wants little, and true taste Hires not the pale drudge Luxury, to waste The scene it would adorn, and therefore still, Nature, with all her children, haunts the hill. The ring-dove, in the embowering ivy, yet Keeps up her love-lament, and the owls flit Round the evening tower, and the young stars glance Between the quick bats in their twilight dance; The spotted deer bask in the fresh moon-light Before our gate, and the slow, silent night Is measured by the pants of their calm sleep. Be this our home in life, and when years heap Their withered hours, like leaves, on our decay, Let us become the over-hanging day,
The living soul of this Elysian isle, Conscious, inseparable, one. Meanwhile
We two will rise, and sit, and walk together, Under the roof of blue Ionian weather,
And wander in the meadows, or ascend
The mossy mountains, where the blue heavens bend With lightest winds, to touch their paramour;
Or linger, where the pebble-paven shore, Under the quick, faint kisses of the sea Trembles and sparkles as with ecstasy,— Possessing and possest by all that is Within that calm circumference of bliss, And by each other, till to love and live Be one-or, at the noontide hour, arrive
Where some old cavern hoar seems yet to keep The moonlight of the expired night asleep, Through which the awakened day can never peep ; A veil for our seclusion, close as Night's,
Where secure sleep may kill thine innocent lights; Sleep, the fresh dew of languid love, the rain Whose drops quench kisses till they burn again. And we will talk, until thought's melody Become too sweet for utterance, and it die In words, to live again in looks, which dart With thrilling tone into the voiceless heart, Harmonizing silence without a sound.
Our breath shall intermix, our bosoms bound, And our veins beat together; and our lips With other eloquence than words, eclipse The soul that burns between them, and the wells Which boil under our being's inmost cells, The fountains of our deepest life, shall be Confused in passion's golden purity,
As mountain-springs under the morning Sun. We shall become the same, we shall be one Spirit within two frames, oh! wherefore two? One passion in twin-hearts, which grows and grew, Till like two meteors of expanding flame, Those spheres instinct with it become the same, Touch, mingle, are transfigured; ever still Burning, yet ever inconsumable :
In one another's substance finding food, Like flames too pure and light and unimbued To nourish their bright lives with baser prey, Which point to Heaven and cannot pass away : One hope within two wills, one will beneath Two overshadowing minds, one life, one death,
One Heaven, one Hell, one immortality,
And one annihilation. Woe is me!
The winged words on which my soul would pierce Into the height of love's rare Universe,
Are chains of lead around its flight of fire.—
I pant, I sink, I tremble, I expire!
Weak Verses, go, kneel at your Sovereign's feet, And say: "We are the masters of thy slave; What wouldest thou with us and ours and thine?" Then call your sisters from Oblivion's cave, All singing loud: "Love's very pain is sweet, But its reward is in the world divine
Which, if not here, it builds beyond the grave." So shall ye live when I am there.
Over the hearts of men, until ye meet
Márina, Vanna, Primus, and the rest,
And bid them love each other and be blest:
And leave the troop which errs, and which reproves, And come and be my guest,—for I am Love's.
Is it that in some brighter sphere
We part from friends we meet with here? Or do we see the Future pass
Over the Present's dusky glass?
Or what is that that makes us seem To patch up fragments of a dream, Part of which comes true, and part Beats and trembles in the heart?
Poems to Liberty, Greece, and Italy.
I STOOD within the city disinterred;
And heard the autumnal leaves like light footfalls Of spirits passing through the streets; and heard The Mountain's slumberous voice at intervals Thrill through those roofless halls;
The oracular thunder penetrating shook
The listening soul in my suspended blood; I felt that Earth out of her deep heart spokeI felt, but heard not:—through white columns glowed
The isle-sustaining Ocean-flood,
A plane of light between two Heavens of azure : Around me gleamed many a bright sepulchre Of whose pure beauty, Time, as if his pleasure Were to spare Death, had never made erasure; But every living lineament was clear
As in the sculptor's thought; and there The wreaths of stony myrtle, ivy and pine, Like winter leaves o'ergrown by moulded snow, Seemed only not to move and grow
Because the crystal silence of the air
Weighed on their life; even as the Power divine
Which then lulled all things, brooded upon mine.
Then gentle winds arose With many a mingled close
Of wild Eolian sound and mountain-odour keen; And where the Baian ocean
Welters with airlike motion,
Within, above, around its bowers of starry green, Moving the sea-flowers in those purple caves Even as the ever stormless atmosphere Floats o'er the Elysian realm, It bore me like an Angel, o'er the waves Of sunlight, whose swift pinnace of dewy air No storm can overwhelm ;
I sailed, where ever flows Under the calm Serene A spirit of deep emotion From the unknown graves
Of the dead kings of Melody. Shadowy Aornos darkened o'er the helm The horizontal æther; heaven stript bare Its depths over Elysium, where the prow Made the invisible water white as snow; From that Typhæan mount, Inarime
There streamed a sunlight vapour, like the standard
Of some ætherial host;
Whilst from all the coast,
Louder and louder, gathering round, there wandered
Over the oracular woods and divine sea
Prophesyings which grew articulate
They seize me—I must speak them-be they fate!
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