Under the quick faint kisses of the sea Where secure sleep may kill thine innocent lights; As mountain-springs under the morning Sun. Those spheres instinct with it become the same, In one another's substance finding food, And one annihilation. Woe is me! The winged words on which my soul would pierce Are chains of lead around its flight of fire.- Weak Verses, go, kneel at your Sovereign's feet, And say: "We are the masters of thy slave; "What wouldest thou with us and ours and thine?" Then call your sisters from Oblivion's cave, All singing loud: "Love's very pain is sweet, "But its reward is in the world divine, 66 Which, if not here, it builds beyond the grave." So shall ye live when I am there. Then haste Over the hearts of men, until ye meet Marina, Vanna, Primus, and the rest, And bid them love each other and be blest: And leave the troop which errs, and which reproves, And come and be my guest,-for I am Love's. RND OF EFIPSYCHIDION. JULIAN AND MADDALO, The meadows with fresh streams, the bees with thyme, Virgil's Gallus. COUNT MADDALO is a Venetian nobleman of ancient family and of great fortune, who, without mixing much in the society of his countrymen, resides chiefly at his magnificent palace in that city. He is a person of the most consummate genius; and capable, if he would direct his energies to such an end, of becoming the redeemer of his degraded country. But it is his weakness to be proud: he derives, from a comparison of his own extraordinary mind with the dwarfish intellects that surround him, an intense apprehension of the nothingness of human life. His passions and his powers are incomparably greater than those of other men, and, instead of the latter having been employed in curbing the former, they have mutually lent each other strength. His ambition preys upon itself, for want of objects which it can consider worthy of exertion. I say that Maddalo is proud, because I can find no other word to express the concentered and impatient feelings which consume him; but it is on his own hopes and affections only that he seems to trample, for in social life no human being can be more gentle, patient, and unassuming than Maddalo. He is cheerful, frauk, and witty. His more serious conversation is a sort of intoxication; men are held by it as by a spell. He has travelled much; and there is an inexpressible charm in his relation of his adventures in different countries. Julian is an Englishman of good family, passionately attached to those philosophical notions which assert the power of man over his own mind, and the immense improvements of B |