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THE TWO SPIRITS.

AN ALLEGORY.

FIRST SPIRIT.

THOυ, who plumed with strong desire
Wouldst float above the earth, beware!
A shadow tracks thy flight of fire—
Night is coming!

Bright are the regions of the air,
And among the winds and beams
It were delight to wander there-
Night is coming!

SECOND SPIRIT.

The deathless stars are bright above:
If I would cross the shade at night,
Within my heart is the lamp of love,
And that is day!

And the moon will sinile with gentle light
On
my golden plumes where'er they move;
The meteors will linger round my flight,

And make night day.

FIRST SPIRIT.

But if the whirlwinds of darkness waken
Hail, and lightning, and stormy rain-
See, the bounds of the air are shaken;
Night is coming!

The red swift clouds of the hurricane

Yon declining sun have overtaken :

The clash of the hail sweeps over the plainNight is coming!

SECOND SPIRIT.

I see the light, and I hear the sound.

I'll sail on the flood of the tempest dark, With the calm within and the light around Which makes night day :

And thou, when the gloom is deep and stark, Look from thy dull earth, slumber-bound; My moonlight flight thou then mayst mark On high, far away.

Some say there is a precipice

Where one vast pine is frozen to ruin
O'er piles of snow and chasms of ice
'Mid Alpine mountains;

And that the languid storm, pursuing
That winged shape, for ever flies
Round those hoar branches, aye renewing
Its airy fountains.

Some say when nights are dry and clear,
And the death-dews sleep on the morass,
Sweet whispers are heard by the traveller,
Which make night day;

And a silver shape like his early love doth pass
Upborne by her wild and glittering hair,
And when he awakes on the fragrant grass,
He finds night day.

LETTER TO MARIA GISBORNE.

LEGHORN, July 1, 1820.

THE spider spreads her webs, whether she be
In poet's tower, cellar, or barn, or tree;
The silkworm in the dark-green mulberry leaves
His winding-sheet and cradle ever weaves!
So I, a thing whom moralists call worm,
Sit spinning still round this decaying form,
From the fine threads of rare and subtle thought,
No net of words in garish colours wrought,
To catch the idle buzzers of the day;

But a soft cell, where, when that fades away,
Memory may clothe in wings my living name
And feed it with the asphodels of fame,

Which in those hearts which must remember me
Grow, making love an immortality.

Whoever should behold me now, I wist,
Would think I were a mighty mechanist,
Bent with sublime Archimedean art

To breathe a soul into the iron heart

Of some machine portentous, or strange gin, Which by the force of figured spells might win Its way over the sea, and sport therein;

For round the walls are hung dread engines, such As Vulcan never wrought for Jove to clutch

[blocks in formation]

Ixion or the Titan :-or the quick
Wit of that man of God, St. Dominic,
To convince Atheist, Turk, or Heretic;
Or those in philosophic councils met,

Who thought to pay some interest for the debt
They owed to Jesus Christ for their salvation,
By giving a faint foretaste of damnation
To Shakspeare, Sidney, Spenser, and the rest
Who made our land an island of the blest,
When lamp-like Spain, who now relumes her firo
On Freedom's hearth, grew dim with Empire :-
With thumb-screws, wheels, with tooth and spike
and jag,

With fishes found under the utmost crag
Of Cornwall and the storm-encompassed isles,
Where to the sky the rude sea seldom smiles
Unless in treacherous wrath, as on the morn
When the exulting elements in scorn,
Satiated with destroyed destruction, lay
Sleeping in beauty on their mangled prey,
As panthers sleep:-and other strange and dread
Magical forms the brick floor overspread-
Proteus transformed to metal did not make
More figures, or more strange; nor did he take
Such shapes of unintelligible brass,

Or heap himself in such a horrid mass
Of tin and iron not to be understood,
And forms of unimaginable wood,

Tc puzzle Tubal Cain and all his brood.

Great screws, and cones, and wheels, and grooved

blocks,

The elements of what will stand the shocks
Of wave and wind and time.-Upon the table
More knacks and quips there be than I am able
To catalogize in this verse of mine:

A pretty bowl of wood-not full of wine,

But quicksilver; that dew which the gnomes drink When at their subterranean toil they swink, Pledging the demons of the earthquake, who Reply to them in lava-cry, halloo !

And call out to the cities o'er their head,—

Roofs, towns, and shrines, the dying and the

dead,

[quaff Crash through the chinks of earth—and then all Another rouse, and hold their sides and laugh. This quicksilver no gnome has drunk-within The walnut-bowl it lies, veined and thin,

In colour like the wake of light that stains
The Tuscan deep, when from the moist moon

rains

The inmost shower of its white fire-the breeze
Is still-blue heaven smiles over the pale seas.
And in this bowl of quicksilver-for I
Yield to the impulse of an infancy

Outlasting manhood-I have made to float
A rude idealism of a paper boat,

A hollow screw with cogs-Henry will know
The thing I mean, and laugh at me, if so
He fears not I should do more mischief.-Next
Lie bills and calculations much perplext,

With steam-boats, frigates, and machinery quaint

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