Orbits measureless, are furled
In that frail and fading sphere,
With ten millions gathered there,
To tremble, gleam, and disappear.

Fragment: "A Gentle Story of Two Lovers Young"

GENTLE story of two lovers

young,

Who met in innocence and died

in sorrow,

And of one selfish heart, whose rancour clung
Like curses on them; are ye slow to borrow
The lore of truth from such a tale?

Or in this world's deserted vale,
Do ye not see a star of gladness

Pierce the shadows of its sadness,

When ye are cold, that love is a light

sent

From Heaven, which none shall quench, to

cheer the innocent?

AM as a spirit who has dwelt
Within his heart of hearts, and I

have felt

His feelings, and have thought his thoughts, and known

The inmost converse of his soul, the tone
Unheard but in the silence of his blood,
When all the pulses in their multitude
Image the trembling calm of summer seas.

I have unlocked the golden melodies
Of his deep soul, as with a master-key,

And loosened them and bathed myself therein

Even as an eagle in a thunder-mist

Clothing his wings with lightning.

On the Medusa of Leonardo

da Vinci in the Floren

tine Gallery

I.

T lieth, gazing on the midnight sky,

Upon the cloudy mountain peak supine;

Below, far lands are seen tremblingly;

Its horror and its beauty are divine.

Upon its lips and eyelids seems to lie
Loveliness like a shadow, from which shine,
Fiery and lurid, struggling underneath,
The agonies of anguish and of death.

II.

Yet it is less the horror than the

grace

Which turns the gazer's spirit into stone;

Whereon the lineaments of that dead face
Are
till the characters be grown
graven,
Into itself, and thought no more can trace;

'Tis the melodious hue of beauty thrown Athwart the darkness and the glare of pain. Which humanize and harmonize the strain.

III.

And from its head as from one body grow,

As

grass out of a watery rock,

Hairs which are vipers, and they curl and flow

And their long tangles in each other lock, And with unending involutions show

Their mailèd radiance, as it were to mock The torture and the death within, and saw The solid air with many a ragged jaw.

IV.

And from a stone beside, a poisonous eft
Peeps idly into those Gorgonian eyes;
Whilst in the air a ghastly bat, bereft
Of sense, has flitted with a mad surprise

Out of the cave this hideous light had cleft, And he comes hastening like a moth that

hies

After a taper; and the midnight sky
Flares, a light more dread than obscurity.

V.

'Tis the tempestuous loveliness of terror; For from the serpents gleams a brazen glare Kindled by that inextricable error,

Which makes a thrilling vapour of the air Become a and ever-shifting mirror

Of all the beauty and the terror thereA woman's countenance, with serpent locks, Gazing in death on heaven from those wet rocks.