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

Languor cannot be:

Shadow of annoyance

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 sad

dest 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,

Better than all treasures

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.

Cancelled Passage

HEIR moss rotted off them, flake

by flake,

Till the thick stalk stuck like a

murderer's stake,

Where rags of loose flesh yet tremble on high, Infecting the winds that wander by.

Ode to Liberty

"Yet, Freedom, yet thy banner torn but flying
Streams like a thunder-storm against the wind."

BYRON.

I.

GLORIOUS people vibrated again

The lightning of the nations:

Liberty

From heart to heart, from tower to tower o'er

Spain,

Scattering contagious fire into the sky,

Gleamed. My soul spurned the chains of its dismay,

And, in the rapid plumes of song,

Clothed itself, sublime and strong;

As a young eagle soars the morning clouds

among,

Hovering in verse o'er its accustomed prey;

Till from its station in the heaven of fame The Spirit's whirlwind rapt it, and the ray

Of the remotest sphere of living flame Which paves the void was from behind it flung, As foam from a ship's swiftness, when there

came

A voice out of the deep: I will record the

same.

II.

The Sun and the serenest Moon sprang forth:
The burning stars of the abyss were hurled
Into the depths of heaven. The dædal earth,
That island in the ocean of the world,
Hung in its cloud of all-sustaining air:
But this divinest universe

Was yet a chaos and a curse,

For thou wert not: but power from worst producing worse,

The spirit of the beasts was kindled there,

And of the birds, and of the watery forms, And there was war among them, and despair Within them, raging without truce or

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