[From the Prophecy of Dante.]

GENIUS.

MANY are poets who have never penned

Their inspiration, and perchance, the best;

They felt, and loved and died, but would not lend

Their thoughts to meaner beings; they compressed

The God within them, and rejoined the stars

Unlaurelled upon earth, but far more blessed

Than those who are degraded by the jars

Of passion, and their frailties linked to fame,

Conquerors of high renown, but full of scars.

Many are poets, but without the

One noble stroke with a whole life

may glow,

Or deify the canvas till it shine With beauty so surpassing all below,

That they who kneel to idols so divine

Break no commandment, for high heaven is there

Transfused, transfigurated: and the line

Of poesy which peoples but the air With thought and beings of our thought reflected,

Can do no more: then let the artist share

The palm; he shares the peril, and dejected

Faints o'er the labor unapproved -Alas!

Despair and genius are too oft connected.

It is that settled, ceaseless gloom

The fabled Hebrew wanderer bore; That will not look beyond the tomb, And cannot hope for rest before.

What exile from himself can flee?
To zones, though more and more

remote.

Still, still pursues, where'er I be,
The blight of life-the demon
Thought.

Yet, others rapt in pleasure seem,
And taste of all that I forsake;
Oh! may they still of transport
dream,

And ne'er, at least like me, awake'

Through many a clime 'tis mine to go,

With many a retrospection curst; And all my solace is to know,

What e'er betides, I've known the worst.

What is that worst? Nay, do not ask

In pity from the search forbear: Smile on- nor venture to unmask Man's heart, and view the Hell that's there.

[From Childe Harold.]

APOSTROPHE TO THE OCEAN.

THERE is a pleasure in the pathless woods,

There is a rapture on the lonely shore,

There is society, where none intrudes, By the deep sea, and music in its

roar:

I love not Man the less, but Nature more,

From these our interviews, in which I steal

From all I may be, or have been be

fore,

To mingle with the Universe, and feel What I can ne'er express, yet cannot all conceal.

Roll on, thou deep and dark blue Ocean-roll!

Ten thousand fleets sweep over thee in vain;

Man marks the earth with ruin-his control

Stops with the shore;-upon the watery plain

The wrecks are all thy deed, nor doth remain

A shador of man's ravage, save his

own,

When, for a moment, like a drop of rain,

He sinks into thy depths with bubbling groan, Without a grave, unknelled, uncoffined, and unknown.

The armaments which thunderstrike the walls

Of rock-built cities, bidding nations quake,

And monarchs tremble in their capitals,

The oak leviathans, whose huge ribs make

Their clay creator the vain title take Of lord of thee, and arbiter of war; These are thy toys, and, as the snowy flakę,

They melt into thy yeast of waves, which mar

Alike the Armada's pride or spoils of Trafalgar.

Thy shores are empires, changed in all save thee

Assyria, Greece, Rome, Carthage, what are they?

Thy waters washed them power while they were free,

And many a tyrant since; their shores obey

The stranger, slave, or savage; their decay

Has dried up realms to deserts:not so thou;

Unchangeable save to thy wild waves' play

Time writes no wrinkle on thine

Thou glorious mirror, where the Al mighty's form

Glasses itself in tempests; in all time, Calm or convulsed-in breeze or gale, or storm,

Icing the pole, or in the torrid clime Dark-heaving; - boundless, endless, and sublime

The image of eternity - the throne Of the Invisible; even from out thy slime

The monsters of the deep are made: each zone

Obeys thee: thou goest forth, dread fathomless, alone.

And I have loved thee, Ocean! and my joy [to be Of youthful sports was on thy breast Borne, like thy bubbles, onward: from a boy

I wantoned with thy breakers -- they

azure brow

rollest now.

have been so moved.