SONNET 251.
"Gli occhi di ch' io parlai."
Those eyes, 'neath which my passionate rapture rose,
The arms, hands, feet, the beauty that erewhile
Could my own soul from its own self beguile,
And in a separate world of dreams enclose,
The hair's bright tresses, full of golden glows,
And the soft lightning of the angelic smile
Which changed this earth to some celestial isle,
Are now but dust, poor dust, that nothing knows.
And yet I live! Myself I grieve and scorn,
Left dark without the light I loved in vain,
Adrift in tempest on a bark forlorn;
Dead is the source of all my amorous strain,
Dry is the channel of my thoughts outworn,
And my sad harp can sound but notes of pain.
"And yet I live!" What immeasurable distances of time and thought are implied in the self-recovery of those words. Shakespeare might have taken from them his "Since Cleopatra died,"—the only passage in literature which has in it the same wide spaces of emotion. There is a vastness of transition in each, which, if recited by Fanny Kemble, would take one's breath away.
The next sonnet seems to me the most stately and concentrated of the whole volume. It is the sublimity of all hopelessness, destined to deliverance, but unable to foresee it.