RT thou pale for weariness Of climbing heaven and gazing on the earth, Wandering companionless Among the stars that have a different birth, - II. Thou chosen sister of the spirit, That gazes on thee till in thee it pities . . . Fragment: "Alas! This Is Not What I Thought Misery and hate; nor did I hope to pass Untouched by suffering, through the rugged glen. In mine own heart I saw as in a glass The hearts of others And when I went among my kind, with triple brass 'Perhaps in continuation of the first poem on page 278, and so forming a sonnet. - ED. T IS the terror of tempest. The rags of the sail Are flickering in ribbons within the fierce gale: From the stark night of vapours the dim rain is driven, And when lightning is loosed, like a deluge from heaven, She sees the black trunks of the waterspouts spin, And bend, as if heaven was ruining in, Which they seemed to sustain with their terrible mass As if ocean had sunk from beneath them: they pass To their graves in the deep with an earthquake of sound, And the waves and the thunders made silent around Leave the wind to its echo. The vessel, now tossed Through the low-trailing rack of the tempest, is lost In the skirts of the thunder-cloud: now down the sweep Of the wind-cloven wave to the chasm of the deep It sinks, and the walls of the watery vale Whose depths of dread calm are unmoved by the gale, Dim mirrors of ruin hang gleaming about; While the surf, like a chaos of stars, like a rout Of death-flames, like whirlpools of fire-flowing iron With splendour and terror the black ship environ, Or like sulphur-flakes hurled from a mine of pale fire In fountains spout o'er it. In many a spire The pyramid-billows with white points of brine In the cope of the lightning inconstantly shine, As piercing the sky from the floor of the sea. The great ship seems splitting! it cracks as a tree, While an earthquake is splintering its root, ere the blast Of the whirlwind that stripped it of branches has past. The intense thunder-balls which are raining from heaven Have shattered its mast, and it stands black and riven. The chinks suck destruction. The heavy dead hulk On the living sea rolls an inanimate bulk, Like a corpse on the clay which is hungering to fold Its corruption around it. Meanwhile, from the hold, One deck is burst up by the waters below, And it splits like the ice when the thaw-breezes blow |