III.

But keener thy gaze than the lightning's glare, And swifter thy step than the earthquake's

tramp;

Thou deafenest the rage of the ocean; thy

stare

Makes blind the volcanoes; the sun's bright

lamp

To thine is a fen-fire damp.

IV.

From billow and mountain and exhalation

The sunlight is darted through vapour and

blast;

From spirit to spirit, from nation to nation,

From city to hamlet thy dawning is cast,And tyrants and slaves are like shadows of night

In the van of the morning light.

Towards the end of the sunny
month of June,

When the north wind congregates in crowds
The floating mountains of the silver clouds
From the horizon- and the stainless sky
Opens beyond them like eternity.

All things rejoiced beneath the sun; the weeds,
The river, and the corn-fields, and the reeds;
The willow leaves that glanced in the light
breeze,

And the firm foliage of the larger trees.

It was a winter such as when birds die
In the deep forests; and the fishes lie

Stiffened in the translucent ice, which makes Even the mud and slime of the warm lakes A wrinkled clod as hard as brick; and when, Among their children, comfortable men Gather about great fires, and yet feel cold= Alas then for the homeless beggar old!

Fragment: Unrisen
Splendour

NRISEN splendour of the bright

est sun,

To rise upon our darkness, if the

star

Now beckoning thee out of thy misty throne Could thaw the clouds which wage an obscure

war

With thy young brightness!

MID the desolation of a city,

Which was the cradle, and is now

the grave

Of an extinguished people; so that pity

Weeps o'er the shipwrecks of oblivion's wave, There stands the Tower of Famine. It is

built

Upon some prison homes, whose dwellers rave

For bread, and gold, and blood: pain, linked to guilt,

Agitates the light flame of their hours,

Until its vital oil is spent or spilt:

There stands the pile, a tower amid the towers And sacred domes; each marble-ribbed roof,

The brazen-gated temples, and the bowers

Of solitary wealth; the tempest-proof
Pavilions of the dark Italian air,

Are by its presence dimmed-they stand aloof,

And are withdrawn-so that the world is bare, As if a spectre wrapt in shapeless terror

Should glide and glow, till it became a mirror Of all their beauty, and their hair and hue, The life of their sweet eyes, with all its error, Should be absorbed, till they to marble grew.