Puff’d with the pride that feeds on lonely thoughts,
In seeking secure harbours, thou must fail
Of all the aim which with such toil thou sought’st:
Either thy lot be wretchedness, or hail
The empty, fond creations of the brain,
For the warm, glowing, living forms of flesh.
I smile at danger, and such fears as reign,
In some men’s brooding minds entangled mesh;
I have a pleasant harbour, and a hope,
For ever wooed by an ethereal breeze;
Not Love but Friendship’s my ambitious scope,
Ne’er shall such fantasies my bosom tease:
Yet if I knew not Friendship, I would rest,
Sad, not despairing, on Creation’s breast.
XXXIX.
Theme of my thought, and beacon to my verse,
Too long thy words have stolen me from thy praise;
Yet now I’ll linger round thee, and rehearse
All that thou wast in past delightful days:
As one, a boy, who leaves his home, his friends,
And thinks he knows them well, sudden discerns
A charm in what seem’d dead, he stops and sends
Message to tree and stone, yet weeps not, turns
Only one parting glance on what, review’d
After few years, heaps quick Eternity
On the bright Past, severing it from the brood
Of the moody Future and the Present’s pity:
So thick, so warm, the thoughts that press my heart,
And goad the gain their frequence fails to impart.
XL.
How loathing’s germ is longing, grief wooes joy,
’Tis but a comment on the hurrying world;
Man knows such shiftings and is only coy
To match them to the stage, whereon he’s hurl’d:
But thou, immutable substance of all beauty,
Shalt yet defeat the purpose of this change,
Shalt purge the essence of its vestment sooty,
And guide its explorations quick and strange;
Thou shalt inhabit and invest a soul,
Whose myriad, intricate voices know one tone;
And I, where’er wavers my wintry pole,
Shall hail that music’s influence as my own:
All Beauty, and all Love radiate from thee,
Thou centre of my soul’s full harmony.
XLI.
Bring me to some waste, whose stream’s Lethean trail,
Scarce stirs its islands of monotonous grass;
Where circling hills heal their huge tattered mail,
With foliage fringing all the mountain pass;
Where the quire that sings, deepens the deadly lull;
Where Time responds, chiming a sullen note;
Where Phœbus, mellowing, blends a glory dull,
With shades that on the wings of darkness float;
Where a gloom of mystery wears strange, luminous, shapes,
Shadowing unholy, ghastly, wizard forms;
Growing into the pulsing life, whose pregnance apes
Fierce fascinations, foul unspeaking storms;
Where, in brief space, myriads of demons urge
One quivering form to Hell’s red hideous verge.