Paused on the marge, Heaven's beautiful New-born,100
Paused on the marge of that wide happiness;
And as a lark that, poised amid the morn,
Shakes from its wing the dews—the plumes of bliss,
Sunn'd in the dawn of the diviner birth,
Shook every sorrow memory bore from earth:
Knowledge (that on the troubled waves of sense101
Breaks into sparkles)—pour'd upon the soul
Its lambent, clear, translucent affluence,
And cold-eyed Reason loosed its hard control;
Each godlike guess beheld the truth it sought;
And Inspiration flash'd from what was Thought.
Still'd evermore the old familiar train102
That fill the frail Proscenium of our deeds,
The unquiet actors on that stage, the brain,
Which, in the spangles of their tinsell'd weeds,
Mime the true soul's majestic royalties,
And strut august in Wonder's credulous eyes;—
Ambition's madness in the vain desires,103
Which seek a goddess but to clasp a cloud;
And human Passion that with fatal fires
Consumes the shrine to which its faith is vow'd;
And even Hope, that fairest nurse of Grief,
Crown'd with young flowers,—a blight in every leaf;
All these are still—abandon'd to the worm,104
Their loud breath jars not on the calm above!
Only survived, as if the single germ
Of the new life's ambrosian being,—love.
Ah, if the bud can give such bloom to Time,
What is the flower when in its native clime?
Love to the radiant Stranger left alone105
Of all the vanish'd hosts of memory;
While broadening round, on splendour splendour shone,
To earth soft-pitying dropt the veilless eye,
And saw the shape, that love remember'd still,
Couch'd 'mid the ruins on the moonlit hill.
And, with the new-born vision, piercing all106
Things past and future, view'd the fates ordain'd;
The fame achieved amidst the Coral Hall;
From war and winter Freedom's symbol gain'd,
What rests?—the Spirit from its realm of bliss,
Shot, loving down,—the guide to Happiness!
Pale to the Cymrian King the Shadow came,107
Its glory left it as the earth it near'd,
In livid likeness as its corpse the same,
Wan with its wounds the awful ghost appear'd.
Life heard the voice of unembodied breath,
And Sleep stood trembling side by side with Death.
"Come," said the Voice, "Before the Iron Gate108
Which hath no egress, waiting thee, behold
Under the shadow of the brows of Fate,
The childlike playmate with the locks of gold."
Then rose the mortal, following, and, before,
Moved the pale shape the angel's comrade wore.
Where, in the centre of those ruins grey,109
Immense with blind walls columnless, a tomb
For earlier kings, whose names had pass'd away,
Chill'd the chill moonlight with its mass of gloom,
Through doors ajar to every prying blast
By which to rot imperial dust had past.