This rainbow "bubble"—like Shelley's "many-coloured dome of glass" in his Adonais—seems, before our very eyes, to be floating up into the empty blue heavens, until it smalls into a bead of gold, and vanishes. It brings to memory—though I am uncertain of the first line—an epitaph in the church at Zennor, a village clustered above the Atlantic on the dreamlike coast of Cornwall—an epitaph cut in fine lettering into its slate slab, while at each corner of the slab Cherubs' heads puff out their round cheeks, representing the winds of the world:
Sorrow, and sin, false hope, and trouble—
These the Four Winds that daily vex this Bubble:
His breath a Vapour, and his life a Span;
'Tis Glorious Misery to be born a Man.
[266]. "O, Sweet Content."
There is a jewel which no Indian mines
Can buy, no chymic art can counterfeit;
It makes men rich in greatest poverty;
Makes water wine, turns wooden cups to gold,