Haunters of palaced wastes![B]
From king-forlorn Versailles
To where, round gateless Thebes, the winds
Like monarch voices wail,
Your tribe capricious ranges,
Reckless of glory’s changes;
Love makes for ye a merry home amid the ruins pale.
V.
Another day, and ye
From knosp and turret’s brow
Shall, with your fleet of crowding wings,
Air’s viewless billows plough,
With no keen-fang’d regretting
Our darken’d hill-sides quitting,
—Away in fond companionship as cheerily as now!
Woe for the Soul-endued—
The clay-enthrallèd Mind—
Leaving, unlike you, favour’d birds!
Its all—its all behind.
Woe for the exile mourning,
To banishment returning—
A mateless bird wide torn apart from country and from kind!
VII.
This moment blest as ye,
Beneath his own home-trees,
With friends and fellows girt around,
Up springs the western breeze,
Bringing the parting weather—
Shall all depart together?
Ah, no!—he goes a wretch alone upon the lonely seas.
VIII.
To him the mouldering tower—
The pillar’d waste, to him
A broken-hearted music make
Until his eyelids swim.
None heeds when he complaineth,
Nor where that brow he leaneth
A mother’s lips shall bless no more sinking to slumber dim.
IX.