'Each attempt seems to shatter the chaplet again;
Only fit now for fingers like mine to run o'er,
'Who return, a recluse, to those cloisters of yore
'Whence too far I have wander'd.

How many long years

'Does it seem to me now since the quick, scorching tears,
'While I wrote to you, splash'd out a girl's premature
'Moans of pain at what women in silence endure !

To your eyes, friend of mine, and to your eyes alone, 'That now long-faded page of my life hath been shown 'Which recorded my heart's birth, and death, as you know, Many years since,-how many!

'A few months ago

'I seem'd reading it backward, that page! Why explain 'Whence or how? The old dream of my life rose again. 'The old superstition! the idol of old!

་

'It is over. The leaf trodden down in the mould

'Is not to the forest more lost than to me

That emotion. I bury it here by the sea

'Which will bear me anon far away from the shore

Of a land which my footsteps shall visit no more.
And a heart's requiescat I write on that grave.

'Hark the sigh of the wind, and the sound of the wave,
'Seem like voices of spirits that whisper me home!
'I come, O you whispering voices, I come!

'My friend, ask me nothing.

'Receive me alone

'As a Santon receives to his dwelling of stone

In silence some pilgrim the midnight may bring:

'It may be an angel that, weary of wing,

'Hath paused in his flight from some city of doom, 'Or only a wayfarer stray'd in the gloom.

This only I know: that in Europe at least

'Lives the craft or the power that must master our East.

'Wherefore strive where the gods must themselves yield at last? 'Both they and their altars pass by with the Past.

'The gods of the household Time thrusts from the shelf; 'And I seem as unreal and weird to myself

'As those idols of old.

Other times, other men,

So be it! yet again

'Other men, other passions!

I turn to my birthplace, the birthplace of morn,

And the light of those lands where the great sun is born!

Spread your arms, O my friend! on your breast let me feel

PART II.

CANTO I.

I.

HAIL, Muse! But each Muse by this time has, I know,
Been used up, and Apollo has bent his own bow
All too long; so I leave unassaulted the portal
Of Olympus, and only invoke here a mortal.

Hail, Murray!—not Lindley,—but Murray and Son.
Hail, omniscient, beneficent, great Two-in-One!
In Albemarle Street may thy temple long stand!
Long enlighten'd and led by thine erudite hand,
May each novice in science nomadic unravel
Statistical mazes of modernized travel!

May each inn-keeping knave long thy judgments revere,
And the postboys of Europe regard thee with fear;
While they feel, in the silence of baffled extortion,
That knowledge is power! Long, long, like that portion
Of the national soil which the Greek exile took
In his baggage wherever he went, may thy book
Cheer each poor British pilgrim, who trusts to thy wit
Not to pay through his nose just for following it!
May'st thou long, O instructor! preside o'er his way,
And teach him alike what to praise and to pay!

R