Entranced I stood, and held my breath to hear
The words that seem'd to warm upon their lips,
As if such contest as two Nightingales
Wage, emulous in music, on the peace
That surely dwelt between them, had anon
Forced its mellifluous anger:—
Then I learn'd
That the fair Two were orphans, rear'd to youth
Song and the lyre, where ringdoves coo remote,
And loitering bees cull sweets in Hyblan dells:
And that their discord, as their union, grew
Out of their rivalry in lyre and song.
Therewith did each in the accustom'd war
Of pastoral singers in Sicilian noons
Strive for his Right—(O Memory aid me now!)
In the sweet quarrel of alternate hymns.
ANTHIOS.
As the sunlight that plays on a stream,
As the zephyr that rustles a leaf,
On my soul comes the joy of the beam,
And a zephyr can stir it to grief.
Whether pleasure or pain be decreed,
My voice but in music is heard;
By the sunny wave murmurs the reed;
From the sighing leaf carols the bird.—
LYKEGENES.
Unto her hierarch Nature's voices come
But through the labyrinthine cells of Thought,
Not at the Porch, doth Isis hold her home,
Not to the Tyro are her mysteries taught;
The secret dews of many a starry night
Feed the vast ocean's stately ebb and flow;
The leaf is restless where the branch is slight,
Still are the boughs whose shades stretch far below.
ANTHIOS.
As the skylark that mounts
With the dawn to the sun,
As the flash from the founts
Of the swift Helicon,