While the slow laconic look
Of her eyes express no censure,
Gazing in them, I adventure,—
Far beyond the wisest book,—
Ways her serpent fancy took.
Yet I know I reverence
One whose gaze in God’s negation;
One who, like an emanation
Of all evil, chains my sense
With satanic influence.
Yet, while still I hear her say,
“One more kiss before the morning!
One more bliss for love’s adorning!
One more kiss ere break of day,”
Still my soul with her must stay.
Stay, nor know, nor ever see!
Till her basilisk beauty flashes,
And the curse, from out the ashes
Of her passion, fiery,
Strikes—destroying utterly.
LYANNA.
“These elementary beings, we are told, were by their constitution more long-lived than man, but with this essential disadvantage, that at death they wholly ceased to exist. In the meantime they were inspired with an earnest desire for immortality; and there was one way left for them, by which this desire might be gratified. If they were so happy as to awaken in any of the initiated (Rosicrucians) a passion, the end of which was marriage, then the sylph became immortal.”—Godwin’s “Lives of the Necromancers.”
Summer came over the Indian Ocean
Girdled with fire, tiaraed with light;
Her eyes all languor, her lips—a potion
To quaff—of poppy. And gold and white
She flashed and sparkled; all gleam and motion,
All blush and blossom she came; and I,
Of the race of the sylphs, o’er the Indian Ocean
Followed her through the sky.
Self-exiled so from the sylphs that cluster,
Pulsing with pearl and burning with blue,
In domes of the dawn,—where the organs bluster
Low of the winds,—where they glow like dew
As the day dreams up, and their armies muster,
Ranges of glitter, in cloudy gold,
At the gates of the Dawn, of blinding luster,
To forth when her gates unfold.
For Summer murmured me, “Follow! follow!”
Whispered one word that was all of love.—
Winged with the speed of the sweeping swallow,
I followed the word she had breathed above:
“Follow! follow!”—the god Apollo
Never followed, with speed as strong
The flying nymph through holt and hollow,
As I that word of song.