Sinking low with love’s emotion!
Levying with look and tone
All love’s rosy arts to mimic
Cytherea’s magic zone!
Trembling up with adoration
To the crimson daisy tip
Budding from the snowy bosom—
Fainter than the rose-red lip!
Rising in a storm of wavelets,
That for shelter, feigning fright,
Prest to those twin-heaving havens,
Harbour’d there beneath her light;
Gleaming in a whirl of eddies
Round her lucid throat and neck;
Eddying in a gleam of dimples
Up against her bloomy cheek;
Bribing all the breezy water
With rich warmth, the nymph to keep
In a self-imprison’d plaisance,
Tempting her from deep to deep.
Till at last delirious passion
Thrill’d the god to wild excess,
And the fervour of a moment
Made divinity confess;
And he stood in all his glory!
But so radiant, being near,
That her eyes were frozen on him
In a fascinated fear!
All with orient splendour shining,
All with roseate birth aglow,
Gleam’d the golden god before her,
With his golden crescent bow.
Soon the dazzled light subsided,
And he seem’d a beauteous youth,
Form’d to gain the maiden’s murmurs,
And to pledge the vows of truth.
Ah! that thus he had continued!
O, that such for her had been!
Graceful with all godlike beauty,
But so humanly serene!