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Pale in the open moonshine; but each one
Under the dark trees seems a little sun,
A meteor tamed; a fixed star gone astray
From the silver regions of the Milky-way.
Afar the Contadino's song is heard,

Rude, but made sweet by distance ;—and a bird
Which cannot be a nightingale, and yet

I know none else that sings so sweet as it
At this late hour;-and then all is still:-
Now Italy or London, which you will!

Next winter you must pass with me; I'll have
My house by that turned into a grave
Of dead despondence and low-thoughted care,
And all the dreams which our tormentors are.
O that Hunt and
were there,

With every thing belonging to them fair!-
We will have books; Spanish, Italian, Greek,
And ask one week to make another week
As like his father, as I'm unlike mine.

Though we eat little flesh and drink no wine,
Yet let's be merry; we'll have tea and toast;
Custards for supper, and an endless host
Of syllabubs and jellies and mince-pies,
And other such lady-like luxuries,-
Feasting on which we will philosophize,
And we'll have fires out of the Grand Duke's
To thaw the six weeks' winter in our blood.
And then we 'll talk ;-what shall we talk about?
Oh! there are themes enough for many a bout

[wood,

Of thought-entangled descant; as to nerves—
With cones and parallelograms and curves
I've sworn to strangle them if once they dare
To bother me,—when you are with me there.
And they shall never more sip laudanum
From Helicon or Himeros ; *—well, come,
And in spite of * * * and of the devil,
We'll make our friendly philosophic revel
Outlast the leafless time;-till buds and flowers
Warn the obscure inevitable hours

Sweet meeting by sad parting to renew :-
"To-morrow to fresh woods and pastures new."

TO MARY,

ON HER OBJECTING TO THE FOLLOWING POEM UPON

THE SCORE OF ITS CONTAINING NO HUMAN INTEREST.

I.

How, my dear Mary, are you critic-bitten, (For vipers kill, though dead,) by some review. That

you condemn these verses I have written, Because they tell no story, false or true!

*'Iuɛpos, from which the river Himera was named, is, with some slight shade of difference, a synonyme of Love.

What, though no mice are caught by a young

kitten,

May it not leap and play as grown cats do, Till its claws come? Prithee, for this one time, Content thee with a visionary rhyme.

II.

What hand would crush the silken-winged fly,
The youngest of inconstant April's minions,
Because it cannot climb the purest sky,

Where the swan sings, amid the sun's
dominions?

Not thine. Thou knowest 'tis its doom to die,

When day shall hide within her twilight pinions,

The lucent eyes, and the eternal smile,
Serene as thine, which lent it life awhile.

III.

To thy fair feet a winged Vision came,

Whose date should have been longer than a

day, And o'er thy head did beat its wings for fame, And in thy sight its fading plumes display; The watery bow burned in the evening flame, But the shower fell, the swift Sun went his

way

And that is dead.—O, let me not believe

That any thing of mine is fit to live!

IV.

Wordsworth informs us he was nineteen years
Considering and retouching Peter Bell;
Watering his laurels with the killing tears

Of slow, dull care, so that their roots to hell Might pierce, and their wide branches blot the spheres

Of heaven, with dewy leaves and flowers;

this well

May be, for Heaven and Earth conspire to foil The over-busy gardener's blundering toil.

V.

My Witch indeed is not so sweet a creature
As Ruth or Lucy, whom his graceful praise
Clothes for our grandsons-but she matches
Peter,

Though he took nineteen years, and she three

days

In dressing. Light the vest of flowing metre

She wears; he, proud as dandy with his stays, Has hung upon his wiry limbs a dress

Like King Lear's "looped and windowed raggedness."

VI.

• If you strip Peter, you will see a fellow, Scorched by Hell's hyperequatorial climate Into a kind of a sulphureous yellow :

A lean mark, hardly fit to fling a rhyme at;

In shape a Scaramouch, in hue Othello,

If you unveil my Witch, no priest nor primate Can shrive you of that sin,-if sin there be In love, when it becomes idolatry.

THE WITCH OF ATLAS.

I.

BEFORE those cruel Twins, whom at one birth
Incestuous Change bore to her father Time,
Error and Truth, had hunted from the earth
All those bright natures which adorned its
prime,

And left us nothing to believe in, worth

The pains of putting into learned rhyme, A lady-witch there lived on Atlas' mountain Within a cavern by a secret fountain.

II.

Her mother was one of the Atlantides:
The all-beholding Sun had ne'er beholden
In his wide voyage o'er continents and seas
So fair a creature, as she lay enfolden
In the warm shadow of her loveliness ;-

He kissed her with his beams, and made all
golden

The chamber of gray rock in which she lay

She, in that dream of joy, dissolved away.

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