IV.

ELEGIAC SONNET,

Inscribed to the Memory of M. M. HAYS, Esq.

HERE sleep'st thou, Man of Soul! Thy spirit flown,
How dark and tenantless its desert clay!

Cold is that heart, which throbbed at sorrow's moan,
Untuned that tongue that charmed the social day.

Where now the Wit, by generous roughness graced?
Or Friendship's accent, kindling as it fell?

Or Bounty's stealing foot, whose step untraced

Had watched pale Want, and stored her famished cell?

Alas! 't is all thou art! whose vigorous mind
Inspiring force to Truth and Feeling gave,
Whose rich resources equal power combined,
The gay to brighten, and instruct the grave!

Farewell! Adieu! Sweet peace thy vigils keep;
For Pilgrim Virtue sojourns here to weep!

V.

TO PHILENIA, ON A STANZA IN HER ADDRESS TO MYRA.*

THY "bosom bankrupt," fair Peru divine,
Of every mental gem, that e'er has shone,
In dazzled Fancy's intellectual mine,

Or ever spangled Virtue's radiant zone!

Thy "bosom bankrupt "!- Nature, sooner far,
Shall roll, exhausted, flowerless springs away,

Leave the broad eye of noon without a ray,
And strip the path to heaven of every star.

Thy "bosom bankrupt "! Ah! those sorrows cease

Which taught us how to weep, and how admire;

The tear that falls to soothe thy wounded peace,
With rapture glistens o'er thy matchless lyre.
Ind and Golconda, in one firm combined,
Shall sooner bankrupt than Philenia's mind.

* The stanza which suggested this sonnet is highly encomiastic on Mr. Paine. It is here given from the "Massachusetts Magazine" of February, 1793:—

"Since first Affliction's dreary frown

Gloomed the bright summer of my days,
Ne'er has my bankrupt bosom known

A solace like his peerless praise."

WASHINGTON ALLSTON.

I.

ON A FALLING GROUP, IN THE LAST JUDGMENT OF MICHAEL ANGELO.

How vast, how dread, o'erwhelming is the thought
Of space interminable! to the soul

A circling weight that crushes into naught
Her mighty faculties! a wondrous whole,
Without or parts, beginning, or an end!
How fearful then on desp'rate wings to send
The fancy e'en amid the waste profound!
Yet, born as if all daring to astound,

Thy giant hand, O ANGELO, hath hurled

E'en human forms, with all their mortal weight,
Down the dread void, fall endless as their fate!
Already now they seem from world to world
For ages thrown; yet doomed, another past,

Another still to reach, nor e'er to reach the last!

II.

ON REMBRANDT, OCCASIONED BY HIS PICTURE OF JACOB'S

DREAM.

As in that twilight, superstitious age,

When all beyond the narrow grasp of mind

Seemed fraught with meanings of supernal kind,
When e'en the learned philosophic sage,

Wont with the stars through boundless space to range,
Listened with reverence to the changeling's tale;
E'en so, thou strangest of all beings strange!

E'en so thy visionary scenes I hail;

That, like the rambling of an idiot's speech,
No image giving of a thing on earth,
Nor thought significant in reason's reach,

Yet in their random shadowings give birth

To thoughts and things from other worlds that come,

And fill the soul, and strike the reason dumb.

III.

ON SEEING THE PICTURE OF ÆOLUS, BY PELLEGRINO TIBALDI.

FULL Well, Tibaldi, did thy kindred mind
The mighty spell of Buonarroti own.

Like one who, reading magic words, receives
The gift of intercourse with worlds unknown,
'T was thine, deciph'ring Nature's mystic leaves,
To hold strange converse with the viewless wind;
To see the spirits, in embodied forms

Of gales and whirlwinds, hurricanes and storms.
For, lo! obedient to thy bidding, teems
Fierce into shape their stern, relentless lord;
His form of motion ever-restless seems;

Or, if to rest inclined his turbid soul,

On Hecla's top to stretch, and give the word
To subject winds that sweep the desert pole.