CXX.

Alas! our young affections run to waste, Or water but the desert; whence arise But weeds of dark luxuriance, tares of haste, Rank at the core, though tempting to the eyes, Flowers whose wild odours breathe but agonies, And trees whose gums are poison; such the plants Which spring beneath her steps as Passion flies O'er the world's wilderness, and vainly pants For some celestial fruit forbidden to our wants.

CXXI.

Oh Love! no habitant of earth thou art
An unseen seraph, we believe in thee,
A faith whose martyrs are the broken heart,
But never yet hath seen, nor e'er shall see
The naked eye, thy form, as it should be;
The mind hath made thee, as it peopled heaven,
Even with its own desiring phantasy,

And to a thought such shape and image given,
As haunts the unquench'd soul-parch'd-wearied-

wrung—and riven.

CXXII.

Of its own beauty is the mind diseased,

And fevers into false creation:—where,

Where are the forms the sculptor's soul hath seized? In him alone. Can Nature show so fair?

Where are the charms and virtues which we dare

Conceive in boyhood and pursue as men,
The unreach'd Paradise of our despair,
Which o'er-informs the pencil and the

And overpowers the

pen,

page where it would bloom again?

CXXIII.

Who loves, raves-'tis youth's frenzy-but the cure

Is bitterer still; as charm by charm unwinds
Which robed our idols, and we see too sure

Nor worth nor beauty dwells from out the mind's
Ideal shape of such; yet still it binds

The fatal spell, and still it draws us on,

Reaping the whirlwind from the oft-sown winds;

The stubborn heart, its alchemy begun,

Seems ever near the prize,-wealthiest when most undone.

CXXIV.

We wither from our youth, we gasp away—
Sick-sick; unfound the boon-unslaked the thirst,
Though to the last, in verge of our decay,
Some phantom lures, such as we sought at first-
But all too late,-so are we doubly curst.
Love, fame, ambition, avarice-'tis the same,
Each idle-and all ill-and none the worst-

For all are meteors with a different name,
And Death the sable smoke where vanishes the flame.

CXXV.

Few-none-find what they love or could have loved,

Though accident, blind contact, and the strong
Necessity of loving, have removed

Antipathies-but to recur, ere long,
Envenom'd with irrevocable wrong;
And Circumstance, that unspiritual god
And miscreator, makes and helps along
Our coming evils with a crutch-like rod,

Whose touch turns Hope to dust,-the dust we all have

trod.

CXXVI.

Our life is a false nature-'tis not in

The harmony of things,-this hard decree,
This uneradicable taint of sin,

This boundless upas, this all-blasting tree,
Whose root is earth, whose leaves and branches be
The skies which rain their plagues on men like dew—
Disease, death, bondage—all the woes we see―
And worse, the woes we see not-which throb through
The immedicable soul, with heart-aches ever new.

CXXVII.

Yet let us ponder boldly-'tis a base (57)
Abandonment of reason to resign

Our right of thought-our last and only place
Of refuge; this, at least, shall still be mine:
Though from our birth the faculty divine

Is chain'd and tortured-cabin'd, cribb'd, confined,
And bred in darkness, lest the truth should shine
Too brightly on the unprepared mind,

The beam pours in, for time and skill will couch the

blind.

CXXVIII.

Arches on arches! as it were that Rome,
Collecting the chief trophies of her line,
Would build up all her triumphs in one dome,
Her Coliseum stands; the moonbeams shine
As 'twere its natural torches, for divine

Should be the light which streams here, to illume
This long-explored but still exhaustless mine
Of contemplation; and the azure gloom
Of an Italian night, where the deep skies assume

CXXIX.

Hues which have words, and speak to ye of heaven,
Floats o'er this vast and wondrous monument,
And shadows forth its glory. There is given
Unto the things of earth, which Time hath bent,
A spirit's feeling, and where he hath leant
His hand, but broke his scythe, there is a power
And magic in the ruin'd battlement,

For which the palace of the present hour

Must yield its pomp, and wait till ages are its dower.