Come to me, Spirit!—Ah, wilt thou not stay for me?
Stay for me! fill me with rest as with prayer!
Mother of hope, let thy touch soothe away for me
All of life’s weariness! make all the day for me
Dim with forgetting! the day and its care!
Come to me! Mix with the soul of me! Stay for me,
Cure me like prayer!
CHATTERTON
“I thought of Chatterton, the marvellous boy,
The sleepless soul that perished in his pride.”
—Wordsworth.
He dreamed of Mendip Hills, and woods
So deep, storm-barriers on the sky
Are not more dark, that rain their floods
From clouds of sullen dye:
And Somerset, where sparsely grew
Gnarled, iron-colored oaks, with rifts,
Between old boughs, of April blue:
Ways where the speedwell lifts
Its bit of heav’n; and, spreading far,—
The gold, the fallen gold of dawn
Held captive in each cowslip’s star,—
The meadows led him on.
Where, round his feet, the lady-smock
And pearl-pale lady-slipper crept;
Where butterflies, pied-wing’d, did rock,
Or, seal-brown, sucked and slept.
O’er which the west shot crooked fire
Athwart a half-moon leaning low;
While one white, arrowy star throbbed higher
In curdled honey-glow.
Was it some elfin euphrasy
That purged his sight and said, “Prepare!
See where the daisies beckon thee;
The harebells ring to prayer?
“Come here and dream! far from the roofs,
The grime and smoke of London Town,
That monster, with its myriad hoofs,
That grinds the poet down!”