Lapas attēli
PDF
ePub

IV.

All things that we love and cherish
Like ourselves must fade and perish,
Such is our rude mortal lot-

Love itself would, did they not.

The Waning Moon

ND like a dying lady, lean and pale,

Who totters forth, wrapt in a

gauzy veil,

Out of her chamber, led by the insane

And feeble wanderings of her fading brain,
The moon arose up in the murky east,
A white and shapeless mass.

[graphic][merged small][merged small][merged small]

In hating such a hateless thing as
me?

There is no sport in hate when all the rage
Is on one side: in vain would you assuage
Your frowns upon an unresisting smile,
In which not even contempt lurks to beguile
Your heart, by some faint sympathy of hate.
Oh! conquer what you cannot satiate;
For to your passion I am far more coy
Than ever yet was coldest maid or boy
In winter noon. Of your antipathy,
If I am the Narcissus, you are free
To pine into a sound with hating me.

[graphic][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small]

'The author has connected many recollections of his visit to Pompeii and Baie with the enthusiasm excited by the intelligence of the proclamation of a constitutional government at Naples. This has given a tinge of picturesque and descriptive imagery to the introductory epodes which depicture these scenes, and some of the majestic feelings permanently connected with the scene of this animating event.

* Pompeii.

The oracular thunder penetrating shook
The listening soul in my suspended blood;
I felt that Earth out of her deep heart spoke
I felt, but heard not:- through white
columns glowed

The isle-sustaining Ocean-flood,

A plane of light between two Heavens of

azure:

Around me gleamed many a bright sepulchre Of whose pure beauty, Time, as if his pleasure Were to spare Death, had never made erasure; But every living lineament was clear

As in the sculptor's thought; and there The wreaths of stony myrtle, ivy, and pine,

Like winter leaves o'ergrown by moulded

snow,

Seemed only not to move and

grow

Because the crystal silence of the air

Weighed on their life; even as the Power divine

Which then lulled all things, brooded upon

mine.

EPODE II. a

Then gentle winds arose

With many a mingled close

Of wild Æolian sound and mountain-odour

keen;

And where the Baian ocean

Welters with airlike motion,

Within, above, around its bowers of starry

green,

Moving the sea-flowers in those purple caves
Even as the ever stormless atmosphere
Floats o'er the Elysian realm,

It bore me like an Angel, o'er the waves
Of sunlight, whose swift pinnace of dewy

air

No storm can overwhelm ;
I sailed, where ever flows
Under the calm Serene

A spirit of deep emotion
From the unknown graves

Of the dead kings of Melody.'

'Homer and Virgil.

« iepriekšējāTurpināt »