But, when spring returns, it brings a renewal of his grief:
"The spring returns, with all her smiling train;
The wanton Zephyrs breathe along the bowers,
The glistening dewdrops hang on bending flowers,
And tender green light-shadows o'er the plain:
And thou, sweet Philomel, renew'st thy strain,
Breathing thy wild notes to the midnight grove:
All nature feels the kindling fire of love,
The vital force of spring's returning reign.
But not to me returns the cheerful spring!
O heart! that know'st no period to thy grief,
Nor nature's smiles to thee impart relief,
Nor change of mind the varying seasons bring:
She, she is gone! All that e'er pleased before,
Adieu! ye birds, ye flowers, ye fields, that charm no more!"
Woodhouselee.
His only comfort now is in thinking that he, too, must soon die:
"Oh! swifter than the hart my life hath fled,
A shadow'd dream; one winged glance hath seen
Its only good; its hours (how few serene!)
The sweet and bitter tide of thought have fed:
Ephemeral world! in pride and sorrow bred,
Who hope in thee, are blind as I have been;
I hoped in thee, and thus my heart's loved queen
Hath borne it mid her nerveless, kindred dead.
Her form decayed—its beauty still survives,
For in high heaven that soul will ever bloom,
With which each day I more enamored grow:
Thus though my locks are blanched, my hope revives
In thinking on her home—her soul's high doom:
Alas! how changed the shrine she left below!"
Wollaston.
Weary of life, now that he is left alone, he devotes himself to God; he directs all his thought to heaven, where Laura awaits and beckons him:
"The chosen angels, and the spirits blest,
Celestial tenants, on that glorious day
My lady joined them, thronged in bright array
Around her, with amaze and awe imprest.
'What splendor, what new beauty stands confest
Unto our sight?'—among themselves they say;
'No soul, in this vile age, from sinful clay
To our high realms has risen so fair a guest.'
Delighted to have changed her mortal state,
She ranks amid the purest of her kind;
And ever and anon she looks behind,
To mark my progress and my coming wait;
Now my whole thought, my wish to heaven I cast;
'Tis Laura's voice I hear, and hence she bids me haste."
Nott.
His love thus purified and his thoughts now turned to God alone, the poet awaits in resignation the coming of the inevitable hour of death. The "Book of Songs and Sonnets," as his Italian poetry may be called, ends in a beautiful hymn to the Virgin Mary, in which the poet breathes forth all his chastened sorrow and hopes. From this we select the following lines: