All the earth and air With thy voice is loud, From one lonely cloud The moon rains out her beams, and heaven is over flowed. What thou art we know not; What is most like thee? From rainbow clouds there flow not Drops so bright to see As from thy presence showers a rain of melody ;— Like a poet hidden In the light of thought, Till the world is wrought To sympathy with hopes and fears it heeded not; Like a high-born maiden In a palace tower, Soul in secret hour With music sweet as love, which overflows her bower: Like a glow-worm golden In a dell of dew, Scattering unbeholden Its aërial hue Among the flowers and grass, which screen it from the view : Like a rose embowered In its own green leaves, Till the scent it gives Makes faint with too much sweet these heavy-winged thieves. Sound of vernal showers On the twinkling grass, All that ever was Joyous, and clear, and fresh, thy music doth surpass. Teach us, sprite or bird, What sweet thoughts are thine : I have never heard Praise of love or wine That panted forth a flood of rapture so divine. Chorus hymeneal Or triumphal chaunt Matched with thine, would be all But an empty vaunt A thing wherein we feel there is some hidden want. What objects are the fountains Of thy happy strain? What fields, or waves, or mountains? What shapes of sky or plain? What love of thine own kind? what ignorance of pain ? With thy clear keen joyance Never came near thee: Thou lovest; but ne'er knew love's sad satiety. Waking or asleep Thou of death must deem Things more true and deep Than we mortals dream, Or how could thy notes flow in such a crystal stream? We look before and after, And pine for what is not. Our sincerest laughter With some pain is fraught: Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought. Yet if we could scorn Hate, and pride, and fear; If we were things born Not to shed a tear, I know not how thy joy we ever should come near. Better than all measures Of delightful sound, That in books are found, Thy skill to poet were, thou scorner of the ground! Teach me half the gladness That thy brain must know, Such harmonious madness From my lips would flow, The world should listen then, as I am listening now! TO THE MOON ART thou pale for weariness Of climbing heaven, and gazing on the earth, Among the stars that have a different birth,- That finds no object worth its constancy? THE QUESTION I DREAMED that as I wandered by the way Mixed with a sound of waters murmuring Under a copse, and hardly dared to fling Its green arms round the bosom of the stream, There grew pied wind-flowers and violets, Daisies, those pearled Arcturi of the earth, The constellated flower that never sets; Faint oxlips; tender blue-bells, at whose birth The sod scarce heaved; and that tall flower that wets Its mother's face with heaven-collected tears, When the low wind, its playmate's voice, it hears. And in the warm hedge grew lush eglantine, Green cow-bind and the moonlight-coloured May, And cherry-blossoms, and white cups, whose wine Was the bright dew yet drained not by the day; And wild roses, and ivy serpentine With its dark buds and leaves, wandering astray; And flowers azure, black, and streaked with gold, Fairer than any wakened eyes behold. And nearer to the river's trembling edge There grew broad flag-flowers, purple pranked with white, And starry river-buds among the sedge, And floating water-lilies, broad and bright, Which lit the oak that overhung the hedge With moonlight beams of their own watery light; And bulrushes, and reeds of such deep green As soothed the dazzled eye with sober sheen. Methought that of these visionary flowers THE WANING MOON AND like a dying lady, lean and pale, |